Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
Summary
In a Brooklyn boarding house in 1947, a young southerner who wants to be a novelist falls in with the couple upstairs. Stingo is twenty two, broke and writing badly. Nathan Landau is brilliant, generous, magnetic and frighteningly unstable. Sophie Zawistowska is Polish, Catholic, a survivor of Auschwitz, and in love with Nathan in a way that is visibly destroying her.
Styron structures the novel so that Sophie's past comes out in pieces, told to Stingo over months, each account slightly different from the last. What she withholds and what she reshapes turn out to matter as much as what happened, and the title refers to a moment she cannot bring herself to describe until very late.
The book is a genuine test of a reader. It runs long, the narrator is self absorbed in ways Styron intends you to notice, and the sexual comedy of Stingo's frustrations sits uneasily beside the material it is interleaved with, deliberately so. Nathan's swings from tenderness to cruelty are hard to sit with for hundreds of pages, and Styron gives you no reliable ground from which to judge Sophie. Some readers find that juxtaposition unbearable and stop. Those who continue tend to find the last hundred pages among the most devastating in postwar American fiction. Go in knowing that this is a novel about a Catholic survivor rather than a Jewish one, that Styron chose this on purpose, and that the choice is the source of the argument the book has attracted for four decades. It is not a comfortable novel and it was never meant to be.
Historical Context & Significance
Published in 1979, Sophie's Choice won the 1980 National Book Award for Fiction. It also generated an argument that has never entirely settled. Critics objected that in centring a Catholic Pole, Styron universalised the Holocaust and softened the fact that Jews were its specific target. Others defended the novel as a study of how atrocity is transmitted to those who were not there. It was pulled from some American school libraries over its sexual content, and banned outright in Communist Poland and the Soviet Union over its treatment of Polish antisemitism.
The 1982 film brought the story to a far larger audience and won Meryl Streep the Academy Award for Best Actress, fixing Sophie in public memory as Streep played her. The phrase from the title has since passed into ordinary English to describe any impossible decision, usually by people who have never read the novel and do not know what it originally described.