Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Sophie's Choice is about surviving the impossible, tolerating the intolerable, and finding small joys when you can until you simply can't anymore. The story is narrated not by Sophie herself, but by a gentleman we know as Stingo (a nickname from his boyhood) who has just recently moved to Brooklyn, NY, in the late 1940s to pursue his career as a writer. Stingo had been working for a publisher (McGraw-Hill) but left because he was feeling uninspired and a bit alien (see comments below re: hats) and he encounters Sophie and her lover/next-door neighbor, Nathan, because they occupy the rooms directly above his own. In fact, in what will become a larger theme in the novel, Stingo hears the couple having extremely loud (and frequent) sex. While he wants to resent them for distracting him from his writerly pursuits, he soon becomes embedded in their intimate coterie.
The actual events of the book take up very little time (it takes place in the course of one summer) but Sophie's history (and Stingo's and Nathan's) unravel as the story progresses, revealing secrets that redefine decades. While Nathan and Stingo are American, Sophie is Polish, and it becomes clear early on that she was imprisoned at Auschwitz (and later Birkenau). After first casting herself (and her family) in the best light possible (i.e., we worked to protect and save Jews from persecution), it becomes clear that her father and husband were both deeply Anti-Semitic, and Sophie herself struggled to find her place politically. She lived with Polish resistance members, but hesitated to dive into the movement because, as it turns out, she had not one, but two small children: a son, Jan, and a daughter, Eva. Sophie's unwillingness to pick a side is irrelevant in the end because she gets arrested by association with her roommates, and she and her children are put on trains to the camps.
The choice, which is revealed only near the end of the book, is this: a drunk SS guard told her as she dismounted the train that because she was Polish and pretty (but not Jewish) she could choose one of her children to keep. She tries to refuse, but the only alternative is that both children are sent to the gas chamber. Ultimately, she picks her daughter Eva, and her son Jan never makes it out of the camp. She had hoped at one point that seducing a different guard and sharing her family's previous anti-Semitism would save Jan and get him freed from the camp (to be sent to a German family and raised as a Nazi; not great but better than dead, in Sophie's eyes) but it seems that this promise is never actualized, and Sophie is rebuffed by the guard.
In the end, only Sophie survives the camp, and her guilt consumes her and drives her directly into the abusive, paranoid schizophrenic, drug-abusing arms of Nathan, a Jew. Their relationship (which reminded me a great deal of the roller coaster in This Side of Paradise) follows a kind of parabolic arc of highs and lows and ultimately ends in their mutual suicide.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Well blobbists, there you have it! I can't say this one was an upper, but I did, on the whole, greatly enjoy reading it. There was more sex (or rather, references to things relating to sex; perhaps it's better to say fixation on the lack of sex) than I really felt like I needed to get the picture, but I may still be a prude in this department, so I will reserve judgement in that area. Here's what I thought about the rest of it!
Stingo, the Southern writer
Stingo was interesting character; he reminded me of a few other protagonists, and had an interesting sort of foil, not-taking-up-too-much-space kind of quality to his character. I did, on the whole, find him to be likable, and enjoyed his droll humor. Here are a few snapshots to paint the picture.
- Less shy than simply proudly withdrawn, I lacked both the opportunity and the initiative to make friends. I loved this line. I don't know if I'd say I'm proudly withdrawn, but I do feel sometimes that I lack both the opportunity and the initiative to make (new) friends. For some reason, it also reminded me of this line from Pale Fire when Shade describes himself: Asthmatic, lame and fat, I never bounced a ball or swung a bat. Something about the layout of the sentences, maybe.
- Being also by habit a late riser, I await the joys of 'brunch'. Yes. I want brunch every day.
Stingo's boss at the publishing house has some particular complaints about him, which I found to be highly amusing:
- Everyone at McGraw-Hill wears a hat.
- It is not wise for a McGraw-Hill employee to be seen with a copy of the New York Post.
There was (to me) an unexpected amount of racial exploration in Stingo's character. While I've read several Black authors who explicitly handle race in the early 20th century, I find it rare for white authors to do so without outright racism, deep prejudice, or a total lack of candor and depth. I was pleasantly surprised by Styron's exploration of this, and while it was by no means perfect, it's one of the things I will remember most (and like most) about the work.
Stingo is living off of a family inheritance that he receives much delayed from his father, and it turns out the money is from his Virginia family selling a slave, Artiste, down South, for supposedly ogling a woman. Stingo keeps the money (but considers tithing at least a portion to the NAACP) and generally doesn't feel too bad about it because he considers himself to be pretty broke and in need. I thought it was a fascinating example of a really tangible 'cost' from slavery, and it made me think (again) about how necessary reparations are. In my opinion, we should work to trace our financial impact (and the future wealth we've withheld) from Black folks across the years, and this math, however complicated or incomplete, should be factored. It can never erase or excuse the tradition of slavery and the aspects of American culture it has informed and defined, but it can at least express contrition and acknowledge the harm.
Stingo gets into a fair amount of fights with Nathan about Northern vs. Southern existence, and Nathan considers Southerners to be despicable racists. He brings up the story of Bobby Weed, who I think is a referent to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who supposedly whistled at a white woman and was brutally tortured and killed by white men as retaliation in 1955. The exact timing doesn't fit, which may be why Styron uses a stand-in name, but the particulars are much the same. I thought this idea of reckoning with slavery as a tradition was really artfully explored. Here are some snippets:
Nathan, to Stingo: Can't you see the truth about yourself? About the South?
On Northern vs. Southern whiteness: At that time the drowsing black behemoth, although beginning to stir, was still not regarded as much of a Northern problem.
Stingo, on being a Southerner: Suddenly sick with a past and a place and a heritage that I could neither believe in nor fathom.
As a northern white woman, I have certainly felt the after-effects of this kind of 'blame the South' mentality. As a young woman, I think I felt a kind of absolution from the evils of slavery because it seemed deeply unlikely that my ancestors had owned any or been involved in the evils of the trade. Now I have come to understand the deeply intrinsic layers of slavery and the ways in which they permeated every fiber of American life (then and now, cloth metaphor intended) and while I still have a great deal of work to do, I have started to cultivate a curiosity about how to do better as a white woman, as a northerner, and as an educator.
As I mentioned, there was quite a bit of sexual tension in the book; it reminded me of Humbert Humbert in a way that was both slightly amusing and somewhat disturbing. Here's how Stingo describes himself:
- I was a recumbent six-foot-long erogenous zone.
- I perspired in the human cocoon of my angst.
Nathan, the glowering golem who works for Pfizer
I loved this description of Nathan, in part because it was so perfect, and in part because it reminded me of the scene in Stranger than Fiction when Dustin Hoffman asks Will Ferrell if he could possibly be a golem and then later asks, Aren't you relieved to hear you're not a golem? Nathan certainly contains a kind of magic, and his mood (and which drugs he's using) determine whether he uses that magic for good or for ill. Nathan's particularities are revealed slowly throughout the novel, and ultimately it seems that Sophie is both deeply in love with Nathan but also perhaps punishing herself for her guilt by staying in the relationship, which is clearly wildly abusive and tumultuous.
While Nathan doesn't know Sophie's full history, his questioning triggers Sophie's continuous guilt:
Nathan, to Sophie: Tell me why it is, oh beauteous Zawistowska, that you inhabit the land of the living.
and later: You played footsie with the SS, didn't you? Isn't that how you got out of Auschwitz?
Stingo, on Nathan, to Sophie: How could anybody do that to you? How could anyone love you and be so unbelievably cruel?
I thought Styron's explanations not only of the camps but also the ways in which they were and weren't palpable to the American populace were fascinating. (Horrifying, yes, but also informative.) He talks about how, for Nathan, though he saw the wastrel that Sophie had become when he first met her and helped to bring her back to health, the camps weren't real until the news reels and footage of the camps made their way to the States.
Until now he simply had not allowed himself to believe. How many things are like that for us, blobbists? How much do we demand to see before we allow ourselves to believe? I thought of police brutality, and the continuous murder of black people at the hands of the police, and how video and pictures and patterns over and over and over are somehow still not enough to make some people allow themselves to believe in the truth and the violence and the trauma of racism.
I haven't gone into particulars, but Nathan beats Sophie when he is in a rage (or high, or having a spell, or all the above) and nearly kills her several times before their mutual suicide. If you're wondering why Stingo and Sophie let him back in after these events, I offer you this:
On Nathan's return: His absence and his whereabouts did not seem to matter; in the same way, his devastating attractiveness made it seem of small importance that he had recently reviled Sophie and me in such an outpouring of animosity and spite that it had made us both physically ill. Are there people like this in your life, readers? People whose attractiveness (not necessarily physical) pulls them magnetically back into their orbit, despite all the alarms and warning bells?
On the absurd: On the day Sophie arrived at Auschwitz, the forsythia was in bloom, and Stingo was eating bananas in Raleigh, North Carolina.
One of the other things that struck me was this reflective quality of Stingo's to imagine where he was and what he was doing when particular tragic events were taking place for Sophie. I can't spend too much time thinking like this because I find it overwhelming, but I do often wonder what atrocities are taking place while I am drinking a coffee, or taking a stroll. I want to believe that in any moment, only good things are happening for everyone, but I know that this isn't true. It reminded me of how when the pandemic first started and I was forced to spend even more time in my home, I read of the surge in domestic violence cases because of women and other folks stuck with their abusers. I know, dark thoughts but there they are. On the plus side, I've read about a surge in supports and attempts to help people navigate the various darknesses that the pandemic has wrought, so that's something at least.
Sophie, the survivor, the lover, the permanent Pole
Sophie's character is gorgeously nuanced. Whether it was understanding...
How she could be in an abusive relationship:
I love Nathan so much that it hurts my heart - and maybe we should not do such a thing as compare one love with another.
How she could even begin to process the Holocausts:
I have learned to cry again, and I think perhaps that means that I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of a human being, but yes, a human being.
How music played a role in her life:
It was music that helped save her.
We will have music where we're going, then, Stingo. I wouldn't be able to last long without music.
How she felt about Nathan's friends who complained about life's small nuisances:
I hate this type of unearned unhappiness!
How she thought:
She paused, in sequence groping for then finding the right word in French, Polish, German, and Russian, but totally at sea in English.
How she suffered:
You should have let me drown, Stingo. No one is filled with such badness. No one! No one has such badness.
Or how she chose:
Suppose I had chosen Jan to go...to go to the left instead of Eva. Would that have changed anything?
Styron made Sophie thoughtful, imperfect, complex, and whole. I was struck by this line in particular:
Punishment by association, retribution through chance occurrence. She kept saying to herself: I don't belong here. Because it reminded me of Irène Némirovsky's attitude toward being taken to the concentration camps. It's disturbing and unsettling to think about how, amidst the horror of that moment, people tried to rationalize the logic of it. As if anyone 'belonged' there; as if anyone should have been tortured or murdered or treated as less than nothing. No one belonged there. Is it survival instinct, escapism, or an attempt at absolution? What drives this?
Wanda, the revolutionary, the resistance fighter
For every moment where Sophie waffles over where she stands, there's Wanda, her roommate, a Polish woman willing to stand up against anti-Semitism. Here are a few great Wanda lines:
To Sophie: You can no longer treat us this way. You have to assume responsibility, Zosia [Sophie]. You've come to the place where you can no longer fool around like this, you have to make a choice!
On helping the Jewish community as a non-Jewish Pole: Whether it does or doesn't save you, I for one will be satisfied that we tried - through our suffering, and probably even our own deaths.
To the Jews, who wonder about her commitment to fighting Nazis: 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? You underestimate their evil if you have such a delusion. Because once they finish you off they're going to come and get me. Wanda is not ultimately motivated by her own survival (in fact, she dies a brutal death in Auschwitz, which is another thing Sophie feels guilty for, as she did not do her utmost to support Wanda's resistance efforts in the camp), but this logic feels applicable to so many things. Imagine any perpetration of evil - does it just stop and hang up its hat when it has erased and brutalized one group? Conquerors, imperialists, fascists - they snowball forward with perpetual motion. They do not stop on their own; they must be stopped by people like you and me, reader.
Poland and the American South
Well, this blob has gotten long, but it deserved the space. I'll leave you with one more interesting bit - the comparison of Poland to the American South. For the sake of this passage, we'll assume the 'race' in question is the Jewish race, though we know race is a construct and Judaism can be a religion, an ethnicity, an identity, and more.
There is a sinister zone of likeness between Poland and the American South which, although anything but superficial, causes the two cultures to blend so perfectly together as to seem almost one in their shared extravagance - and that has to do with the matter of race, which in both worlds has produced centuries-long, all-encompassing nightmare spells of schizophrenia. In Poland and the South the abiding presence of race has created at the same time instant cruelty and compassion, bigotry and understanding, enmity and fellowship, exploitation and sacrifice, searing hatred and hopeless love.
And then later, just so we don't fall into the same trap we mentioned before of absolving the North, this line, from Stingo's father:
Someday - mark my word - it will be clearly demonstrated that the North is every bit as steeped in prejudice as the South, if not more so.
Words that were new to me
anchorite - someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic life; a religious recluse
lucre - money, especially when regarded as sordid or distasteful or gained in a dishonorable way (for Mama Kitty - from the Latin, lucrum - profit, advantage, love of gain, avarice)marmoreal - made of or likened to marble (I'm not gonna lie, I thought this had something to do with marmots.)
thaumaturge - a worker of wonders and performer of miracles; a magician (for Mr. Portokalos, this is from the Greek for working marvels)
Lines I Liked
- Beneath all the jollity, the tenderness, the solicitude, I sensed a disturbing tension in the room.
- In the angled windowpane she saw the reflection of her pale face beneath the checkered scarf, below this the blue and white stripes of her coarse prisoner's smock; blinking, weeping, gazing straight through her own diaphanous image, she glimpsed the magical white horse again, grazing now, the meadow, the sheep beyond, and further still, as if at the very edge of the world, the rim of the drab gray autumnal woods, transmuted by the music's incandescence into a towering frieze of withering but majestic foliage, implausibly beautiful, aglow with some immanent grace.
- Stingo's dad, to Stingo, on visiting NYC - Your youth, I suppose, that wonderful flexibility of your age that allows you to be beguiled by, rather than devoured by, this octopus of a city. Lol. That's how I feel literally every time I visit my friends in NYC.
- The spell of the South was upon me like a minor ecstasy, or a major heartache. This might be one of my all-time favorite lines from a book. I thought about using it for the title of this blob, but it didn't really encapsulate the full story as well as the line of Sophie's that I chose.
- I thought that Sophie would not have wanted a priest or any ministrations of her church - perhaps a blasphemous assumption, and one that consigned Sophie to hell, but I was certain (and still am) that I was correct. In the afterlife Sophie would be able to endure any hell.
Referents and Reverberations
While this book reminded me of many books that came before and after, some of which I've already mentioned earlier, there's just one moment that stood out to me.
This line, about Auschwitz:
Next to food and privacy, the lack of sleep was one of the camp's leading and universal deficiencies; sought by all with a greed that approached lust, sleep allowed the only sure escape from the ever-abiding torment, and strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely) usually brought people pleasant dreams, for as Sophie observed to me once, people so close to madness would be driven utterly mad if, escaping a nightmare, they confronted still another in their slumber.
Reminded me of one of my favorite lines from Proust, when the narrator is a little boy and he wakes from a nightmare:
A smile of joy, of pious thanksgiving to God who is pleased to grant that life shall be less cruel than our dreams. Perhaps in Sophie's case, thanksgiving that dreams are less cruel than our life.
Well, friends, that brings me to the end of this blob. I don't have anything sweet to leave you with, so instead I'll leave you with this, a reflection from Stingo:
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world.
I write not to remind us that evil can never be extinguished, but to ardently hope that we can be the ones who work to snuff it out, day after day, and night after night. May you have pleasant dreams, but also pleasant realities.
Keep each other safe, keep faith, Black Lives Matter, love one another. I'm off to read Mar's Favorite Color.
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