Artless Morality

...But, no, the telling isn't in the pa-rodic vein...

...Styron has evidently read up on concentration camp life...

...So few women have any informed knowledge or understanding about anything...

...The narrator, a 22-year-old former Marine, who, we are put on notice several times—a wink here, a nudge there —will one day write a book about Nat Turner, becomes embroiled with the pair and tells their incredible tale in a prose that moves unsettlingly between the Thomas Wolfian and the Bruno Bettleheimish...

...He uses whatever comes to hand—drugs, drink, sex, suicide attempts, small children and mother love—to invigorate matters, and serves it all up in pretty ripe prose: "I am a fairly good swimmer, but on that day I possessed truly Olympic bravura, aware even as I thrashed my way through the sluggish brine that sheer fright and desperation were animating the muscles of my legs and arms, propelling me outward and outward with a ferocity of strength I did not know was within me...

...With his nerve endings at the snapping point, Stingo concludes that he wants to hear no more about Auschwitz, and the reader may sympathize...

...Oh, Nathan, where were you when Stingo had need of you...

...As the tale jerks along, with many starts and stops for recapitulation, Styron seems to be aware that the reader's attention may be flagging...

...I'm curious about this...

...Is Styron kidding them...

...Jews have threatened this order, and it is only just now that they finally suffer for it...

...There are speeches by resistance fighters that seem to come right out of old Warner Brothers movies: "The Nazis hate you the most, Feldshuh, and you will suffer the most by far, but they're not going to stop with the Jews...

...Hoss responds: "You speak with a great deal of feeling in this matter...

...Sitting there in the wan light, both Sophie and I had, I think, a feeling that our nerve endings had been pulled out nearly to the snapping point by the slow accumulation of too much that was virtually unbearable...

...Well, William Styron has some time since joined them, and now the author of The Long March, that powerful work created out of personal experience, has written a novel that seems to have been inspired more by the impulses of a moralist than a novelist and to be compounded from other people's books...

...And Sophie, the sorrowing heart of the novel, may be remembered, if remembered at all, as one of the blander heroines of our time...

...Sophie says: "Yet it is easy to see why the Jews have inspired such hatred in Christians as well as in people like yourself, Gottglaubiger, as you said to me just a moment ago, righteous and idealistic non-believers who are only striving for a new order in a new world...

...I now saw that I could not have caused her worse pain had she possessed a hot inflamed cicatrix from which I had savagely yanked the stitches in a horrible ball of fresh sutures and outraged flesh...

...or when the narrator, Stingo, rhapsodizes upon dear old daddy, another prophet, and the enlightened South...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman Can it be that Sophie's Choice is a daring effort at parody, a take-off not only on the Southern novel, the Jewish novel and the adolescent sex novel, but even on that not-to-be parodied subject, the concentration camp...

...He lays on the horrors hot and heavy, but whether they can add a jot or tittle to anyone's knowledge of evil is doubtful...

...Sophie has taken to drink...

...He keeps producing new heart-tugging secrets from Sophie well after she has worn out her portion of interest...

...Sophie's tale, improbable in itself, is told most awkwardly...

...Or us...

...In his telling, Sophie's experience becomes a sequence of little melodramas—involving lovers, sadists, resistance fighters, and her children—that cannot be saved by his high-pitched prose: "And Kazik's words, as excruciatingly hurtful as the sudden slice across her face of a kitchen knife...

...As if aware of this fundamental problem yet unwilling to surrender to it, Styron introduces characters for no apparent reason other than to have them destroyed and thereby presumably enhance our knowledge of evil...

...Consider the proceedings: The narrator, a "lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews,"—Flatbush, 1947—finds himself entangled in the passions of Nathan and Sophie...

...The gas ovens were real, and it is damnably difficult to make them any more real than so many reports and photographs already have...

...he knows the facts...

...his eye for the sentence hobbled by an awkward rhythm, for the attitudinized reflection, the onanistic dalliance, the less than felicitious metaphor, was unsparingly sharp...

...A lot of this goes a little way...

...For a woman, you talk like one who has a certain amount of knowledge of the crimes of which Jews are capable...

...Poor Stingo is horny, yet his naivite, required so that illumination may gradually flow upon him and his reader, is heavily overdrawn...

...Stingo-Styron, age 22, promises himself: "Some day I will write about Sophie's life and death and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world...

...The couple enjoy prodigious bouts of love-making in the periods when Nathan is not calling her bad names, kicking her in the ribs or urinating in her mouth...

...You underestimate their evil if you have such a delusion...

...The narrator, seeking to hold our suspense by avoiding straightforward narrative, is forced to such expedients as "But as he later explained to Hoss in an episode I have earlier narrated . . ." One waits and waits and waits—hoping to learn what is so special about these people that they warrant all the language and emotion being lavished upon them...

...Do you think when they finish with you Jews they're going to dust off their hands and stop murdering and make their peace with the world...

...When Styron seeks to be funny, he can produce laughs—notably in poor Stingo's bouts with a Jewish American princess, Leslie Lapidus, and a Baptist miss, Mary Alice Grim-ball, who in their separate peculiar ways, cause him immeasurable frustration as he seeks to rid himself of his burdensome virginity...

...Nathan is brilliant and crazy, a fiery prophet and popper of uppers...

...her life is a series of reactions to the desperate requirements of her creator...

...No one can charge Styron with not trying...

...Or are they just kidding each other...

...Their relationship is operatic, Nathan giving forth with high notes of love and hate as the fit takes him, and Sophie performing an endless aria in peculiar diction about her childhood in Poland and her agonies in Auschwitz...

...Early on Stingo-Styron, new in New York, daydreams about the literati—Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Irwin Shaw—whom he aspires to join...

...Good riddance, I say...

...Wherefore the suspicion of parody...

...Among those ordered to their deaths in Crematorium II at Birkenau were the music teacher Stefan Zaorski and his pupil, the flutist Eva Maria Zawistowska, who in a little more than a week would have been eight years old...

...If the reader knows he is supposed to laugh, in the case of Stingo's dealings with Leslie and Mary Alice, however, he does not know how to receive speeches like those between Hoss, the concentration camp head, and Sophie pretending to be a Jew-hater in order to save her child...

...Given such an enormity, documentation serves more powerfully than story-telling...

...he has been in and out of the mental wards since boyhood, and his flashes of brilliance are an old literary convention...

...Beauteous albeit toothless Sophie, though not a Jew, endured Auschwitz, where she lost her two children and her teeth...

...This novel attempts to bring together somehow the experience of the European Jew and the American Southerner, the black and the white, as well as to plumb madness, to celebrate the fever and foolishness of sex, and to carry the reader into the depths of the concentration camp...

...or when Nathan falls to Sophie's f eet during one of his moments of self-abasement...

...Nathan is mad—but his madness, it turns out, has nothing to do with the sufferings of his people or the condition of the world...

...Can the book be taken as anything else when Sophie falls to the feet and (perhaps) licks the boots of the concentration camp commandant...

...Among brilliant, loony Nathan's accomplishments, Stingo tells us, were astonishing critical abilities...

...He is more jealous than Othello, she almost as pure as Desde-mona...

...These scenes owe something to Philip Roth, just as those with Nathan owe something to Norman Mailer, and Sophie's story owes much to the kind of sensibility that produces what used to be known as women's fiction...

...She heard her words spilling over one another in a rush, conscious of the haste and abbreviation and her consuming need to arrive at the answer to the question which had been literally twisting her intestines for twelve hours...

...Alas, his imagination does not carry him much beyond them...

...That kind of explicitness betrays a writer's awareness that his more subtle techniques seem not to be working...