I read three other books between the day I began Sophie’s Choice and when I completed it. It was among the strangest books I’ve read: it had moments of pure drudgery, of self-indulgence, of compelling storytelling, of discomfort, of confusion, of literary triumph. When I reached the moment of the titular choice, all my struggles through the purple prose and plodding details felt worthwhile. But at that moment of completion, I had no words to describe my experience. Only a few months later did my feelings, and this post’s title, coalesce.
William Styron’s style in Sophie’s Choice is so over the top that, if considered as satire, it could be a true comedic masterpiece. The book reads as a fantasy version of Styron’s own youth: a self-absorbed aspiring writer in New York meets a beautiful Polish Catholic who spent time in a concentration camp during World War II, along with her bipolar, drug-addled boyfriend. Various tales of drinking, sexual fantasy, and flashbacks from characters other than our sole narrator are described in impossible detail.
The book is a beautiful slog. It’s the written version of a show recommended by a friend, with the caveat that after the first two seasons, it gets really good. It’s a writer throwing the dictionary and thesaurus and hypothetical notes from decades of therapy he never attended, empowered by the immense security provided to a middle-aged white man working on a novel in the 1980s. It’s fascinating and frustrating in the ideas it seems to put forth, its explicit detail, its erudite and overdone diction, and the surprising success of the overall story despite everything that could inspire a frustrated reader to put down the book and never return.
Sophie’s Choice is a book worth reading and studying both for its content and for its context. It’s the work of a writer who appears to write with intention, yet that intention is crafting their ideal opus to win an award rather than to say something from within.
I still don’t know whether I recommend this book, but it sure is one I’d love to take a class about, or listen to a panel of authors with a variety of backgrounds discuss it. I’ve since moved on to my usual stack of science fiction, but Sophie’s Choice was a worthwhile challenge that will stick with me.