Sophie's Choice:

...But lovely gem of a phrase," she denounces around the privacy of his creative con- in 1947 her anguish initially serves to the mood of the group as "unearned unsciousness, then, he casts forth furtive sensitize him to the despair of his happiness...

...But trouble his art needs...

...She has been the say, this sprawling, slovenly America, a Southerners already have their sacrificial generalized victim of an incomprehensi- rural bumpkin converted in a twinkling lamb in the Negro race...

...On the road to this recommendation it...

...Southerners, he reasons, have During the historical present of Styron slyly invites us to apply to the always responded more warmly to Jews Sophid s Choice, the young author sees fiction of his Jewish contemporaries who than Northerners: in part because of a the relationship of Sophie and Nathan were also beginning their assault upon shared affinity for the obdurate patriarchs through to its fatal end and listens at great American literature in 1947...

...it is a further study of to promote the adoption of a con- theirs "the power to protect life, includthe intrusion into human history of an stitutional amendment that would over- ing the unborn...

...Although her listener, he is, of break in upon even sacred silence...

...novel as the tradition of great storytelold boy (notably named Artiste) from the The historical present of the novel, ling), why must he seek a vehicle for our 11 May 1979: 277 that is, the actual end of the institution of course, also her creator and the convenSomeday I will understand Ausch- Negro slavery-the narrator of Sophie's tion of his listening and reflecting at witz...

...The greatest of these scenes Choice...

...In the final narrative mastery continues to be ascuracy would have been: Someday I scene, the young author having recently tounding and since Sophie's story is alwill write about Sophie's life and masqueraded as a Presbyterian minister ways part of the particular story of what death, and thereby help demonstrate awakes on the beach in the morning to happened in Brooklyn in 1947 as well as how absolute evil is never extin- find that it is morning-excellent and fair part of the monumental story of what guished from the world...

...happened in Poland during the war his itself remains inexplicable...

...The condition at the center of his intended Jewish, so that for all her otherness, her young author, a glutton for words, is work, for all his familiarity with its being victimized in parallel with Artiste, sated, made positively dizzy by the milieu...

...It is written territories) and to state legislatures in from Nat Turner...

...Congress than any similar proposal...

...But she is unaffected by the assesses his success Styron himself mea- prisoners from Warsaw to Auschwitz encounter, and Styron thus reveals, con- sures it in the line quoted on these pages...

...In what the author calls "a his environment as a desirable hedge than thirty years after that summer...

...Still, he has to make Sophie's story yield its larger meaning, spurred, among other things, by his reading of George An exercise in advocacy Steiner on the holocaust...

...celebrated, mature author who shares his year-old self, rents a room in the Brook- musings about his subject with the lyn house of Mrs...

...nation alone is inadequate to account for in RXOE V. Wade and Doe v. Bolton...

...this continent...

...Although he does not then realize she is also akin to him, another white novelty and daring of their terms-penis it, he is in Jewish Brooklyn to borrow the Christian island in a sea of Jews, this envy, oral sex, orgasmic function...

...rather, it would restore sive evil...

...This was a brave statement choice has since the holocaust experi- times appears not so much to enrich what but innocently absurd...

...At the close of the summer of '47 ment of them...

...the horror remains intact and cause she talks of a moral and physical Sophie herself, Styron does, indeed, asunaffected for all his profound and pas- landscape alien to the listening young sert art's power and thus art's right to sionate concern...

...Indeed, Styron ble historical atrocity and the personal into an urban terrorist, a society electric would not have been in those Brooklyn victim of a deliberately satanic moral at- with implicit patricide of a scope to lodgings, freed for a season from the rocity, yet she feels the guilt of a perpe- match the explicit fratricide of a century need to earn his bread, were it not for a trator...

...that is, to restrict or evil so enormous that historical determi- rule the Supreme Court's 1973 decisions regulate or place conditions on abortion...

...Sophie's ex-Tidewater author bent on writing a thor is immediately and intensely at- story must be the vehicle for his undernovel in which he must imagine himself tracted to Sophie, the survivor of another standing the nightmare of contemporary into the causes of the suicide of his hell, Auschwitz, and although the pull is history...

...reports, has received more support in acquiesce, he affirms, is to conspire to The Free Press, $11.95, 288 pp...

...But whereas Nat, unable to pray in the These decisions had the effect of in- the book critically examines the jurispruopening scene in jail, does in the morning validating state laws restricting abortion dential philosphy (or philosophies) and scene at the close have a Bible given him and substituted for them the Court's own the constitutional theory embedded in the and with it once again bridges social evil criteria, which create a virtually unli- Court's decisions...

...phrase (one also, it must be noted, that inner self...

...What I is ridden by the renewed horrors of the cies in the power of the telling...

...Sophie will become the center of another for Sophie, the survivor, there is only Rather than accepting the exoticism of novel, Sophie's Choice, completed more disgust...

...Here still remains, we might that must be made to bind-because ate account of her life...

...No one will enced no correlative to emancipation but she says as to compensate for deficienever understand Auschwitz...

...The permit evil to retain a privileged status...

...Lurzer Ziff reader...

...man...

...heroine, Maria Hunt, a young woman he strongly erotic-she is beautiful and her In one of the novel's early scenes the had known in high school...

...But his might have set down with more ac- '50s, '60s, and early '70s...

...To John T. Noonan, Jr...

...She matches the capacity of his stand Auschwitz, and before the reader tion of the journey of the trainload of imagination...

...This book is an to Congress in its jurisdictions (e.g., the Sophie's Choice, then, continues on exercise in advocacy...

...Zimmerman's the young au- events in the '50s and '60s...

...through the meaning it acquired from for the ex-Marine, ex-Duke University, At Mrs...

...The Nazi perpetrator of the central, sheer virtuosity keeps the frail account of -Sophie's Choice personal crime against Sophie's moral Sophie from snapping under the weight it condition outside the circumstances of identity assaults her because as a death- must bear...

...With so much earned unhappiness legacy of $500, his share of his father's will take him another thirty years to ar- in his America, why must the possessor freaky discovery that year of a cache of ticulate, the structure of feeling sum- of the intelligence that realized Nat money in the family house in Virginia...

...only hope to unburden voice for so much of the narrative be- such writing, far more than in the story of himself...

...The descrippuberty...

...In the long run, awareness, at which, it seems, they have yearnings and remote from the psychic Sophie, whom he learns is Polish, not all arrived through psychoanalysis...

...marized thus by Simone Weil: "Afflic- Turner in its symbolic fullness and of a Successfully hidden for almost a century, tion stamps the soul to its very depths mastery of naturalistic narrative the money had been received by his with the scorn, the disgust and even the technique unmatched by his American great-grandfather for the sale of a slave, a self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime peers (so that he is almost singleparticularly nasty transaction in that it logically should produce but actually handedly sustaining the tradition of the broke up a family and sent a sixteen-year does not...

...draft amendment would not express any Rather, through telling Sophie's story he Robert G. Hoyt national judgment on the legality or morwill have his stab at understanding mas- ality of abortion...

...But it is a and prophets of the Old Testament, and length to her conflicting, evasive, cal- phrase that can be brought home to Styin part-baleful fact that becomes a tie culating, yet eventually full and passion- ton's door...

...She had died couplings with her lover, Nathan, occur narrator is at a beach with Sophie in comin despair, but the young Styron is all too audibly over his head-it also gains pany with a group of young, clever, aware that he has led a life much like the strength from the promise it has of shriv- bookish, attractive Jews whose conversalife of other Americans of his age, trou- ing him of his guilty acceptance of Ar- tion is sharp with the pain of their selfbled only by minor guilts and major tiste's head-price...

...He comes to experience what it ago...

...cuts through every callous that has grown sciously or not, that the creative task he There is a certain weakness inherent in upon our consciousnesses after our many undertook in writing about Sophie is one Styron's dependence upon Sophie's exposures to holocaust literature, and in in which he car...

...tomed to gross atrocities that, he realizes, and directly imagines the Polish scenes, It is a question of which Styron is they are acceptable and sinless because calling them up almost as incantations, acutely aware throughout Sophie's there is no God to enforce such a judg- he is superb...

...Why import unhappi- camp official he has become so accus- When Styron himself bypasses Sophie ness...

...The form of suggestion that silence is the only fit ABORTION IN AMERICA IN THE SEVEN- amendment favored by the author is one answer to what occurred, that what was TIES largely of his own devising which, he unspeakable is best left unspoken...

...Yetta Zimmerman...

...Auschwitz but not a judgment day-only morning...

...Books: BHERKINGSACRED SILENCES N THE SUMMER of 1947, the narrator of $OPHIEI CHOICE then, comes to us within the controlling ISophie's Choice, whom William Sty- William Styron voice of the contemporary present of a ron asks us to accept as his twenty-two- Random House, $12.95, 472 pp...

...For all he learned from Steiner, he resents the A PRIVATE CHOICE: criminal law is concerned...

...He speaks of the research he conThe lodgers in the house and the tone of ducted into the holocaust and he sees the surrounding neighborhood are so in- relative comfort of a Tidewater farm to what he experienced in the late '40s tensely Jewish as to be positively exotic the hell of the Georgia turpentine mills...

...His action and reasoning are at sensationally brutal episodes that lie tic fantasy that haunted him since his the core of Styron's attempt to under- ready to hand in the record...

...The author inquires and divine benevolence-foreshadows, mited "liberty of abortion" so far as also into the sources of the social and Commonweal: 278...

...F IRST, definition...

...Once a religious man, he occurs toward the close of the novel, and Sophie comes to his bed, although she is longs for the return of God and so devises as in Nat Turner he evokes pity, fear, on the eve of returning to her lover and to an act so sinful that it must be recognized terror, and theological anguish without certain death, and gives him as an uncon- as sin and therefore must restore a judg- recourse to extended descriptions of the ditional gift the fulfillment of every ero- ing God...

...Southern filaments with which to attach heroine, Maria, of whom she reminds Indeed, in context, it is a gemlike his new surroundings to the needs of his him...