Sophie's Choice
William Styron · 1979
Styron's 1979 Holocaust novel, told from Brooklyn through a Southern writer's encounter with Sophie, a Polish survivor. Her secret (the choice that gives the novel its title) is among the most shattering revelations in American fiction. A novel about guilt, survival, and the impossibility of testimony.
The case against
Stingo's sexual frustrations get nearly as many pages as Auschwitz, and the whole Leslie Lapidus episode could vanish without anyone noticing. Styron's prose turns purple at exactly the moments restraint would devastate, and long stretches read as lectures on Holocaust historiography from a narrator whose main qualification is proximity to Sophie's beauty.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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