Sophie's Choice

Stingo in Brooklyn

Sophie’s Choice opens with Stingo — William Styron’s barely disguised autobiographical narrator, a young Virginian fresh from a brief career at a New York publishing house — arriving in the summer of 1947 at a pink boarding house in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with literary ambitions, a small inheritance, and a profound ignorance of the world he is entering. The Brooklyn he arrives in is a world defined by its Jewish intellectual culture: passionate, argumentative, cosmopolitan in a way that Stingo’s Southern upbringing has not prepared him for. He is an outsider twice over — to the city, and to the particular gravity of the postwar moment, the weight of what has just happened in Europe.

In the rooms above his own live Sophie Zawistowski and Nathan Landau, and the novel’s first movement is the unfolding of his friendship with them both. Nathan is brilliant, charismatic, volcanic — a man whose energy seems to light the air around him, and whose explosions of cruelty toward Sophie are followed by extravagant tenderness. Sophie is beautiful, wounded, possessed of a past she reveals only in fragments and with obvious reluctance. Stingo falls in love with her and is captivated by Nathan, and begins to understand, slowly, that the household above him is organized around a catastrophe he cannot yet name.

Styron uses Stingo’s innocence deliberately. As a Southerner whose own culture has its own original sin — slavery, which the novel explicitly parallels with the Holocaust — Stingo is both ill-equipped to understand what Sophie has survived and strangely positioned to recognize the logic of collective guilt. His gradual education is the novel’s structural armature, and the fact that he does not fully understand what he is hearing until late is what allows the revelation to arrive with its full force.

Sophie and Nathan

Sophie Zawistowski is one of American fiction’s great tragic figures. A Polish Catholic who survived Auschwitz — survivor’s guilt being, the novel insists, a kind of second imprisonment — she has arrived in Brooklyn via displaced persons camps and a precarious passage through a world that does not know what to do with people who have seen what she has seen. Her beauty is part of her armor and part of her curse. She has learned to make herself pleasing, to deploy charm as a survival mechanism, and she continues to do so in Brooklyn even when it is not necessary.

Nathan Landau, her lover, is brilliant in the way Styron clearly associates with a particular Jewish intellectual tradition — witty, omnivorous, capable of tenderness and cruelty in equal measure. His mental instability is revealed gradually, and the reader comes to understand before Sophie fully admits it that Nathan is dangerous. But the novel is equally interested in why Sophie returns to him after each eruption, each humiliation, each episode of paranoid violence. The answer is not simply that she cannot leave but that she does not fully want to: Nathan’s vitality, his furious engagement with life, mirrors the world that was destroyed, the Jewish intellectual culture of Europe that the camps eliminated. His instability and his brilliance are, in the novel’s strange logic, connected — the same intensity that makes him magnificent makes him lethal.

The Brooklyn apartment is a world unto itself, desperately alive and always near catastrophe, a domestic space that recapitulates what happened in Europe: passion and destruction, beauty and annihilation, operating in the same small rooms.

The Choice

Styron withholds the full truth of what happened to Sophie at Auschwitz for most of the novel’s length. Sophie tells Stingo her story in pieces, revising and correcting as trust deepens, each version edging closer to a truth she has spent years unable to speak directly. The revelation — which the novel builds to with extraordinary formal patience — is not simply that Sophie experienced atrocity, which is already known, but that she was forced to make a specific, unspeakable choice that the camp’s commandant imposed on her as an act of power, a demonstration of absolute authority over human life.

What Sophie has lived with since is not only grief but guilt — the guilt of having survived, of the specific mechanism by which she survived, which cost something that no subsequent life can compensate for. She cannot accept survival because survival is contaminated by its cost. Her relationship with Nathan, which the novel now illuminates from this angle, is not masochism but something more precise: a seeking of the punishment she believes she deserves, a refusal to allow herself a life that feels clean.

Stingo emerges from this story changed permanently. The novel ends with the adult Stingo looking back at that summer, and Styron’s final argument is about the particular education that the Holocaust offered to Americans who were not its victims but are not, therefore, untouched: an encounter with a category of evil that renders ordinary moral reckoning inadequate and leaves something permanently unsettled at the center of any consciousness that has genuinely grappled with it.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of American fiction’s most unflinching confrontations with the Holocaust, sustained by a performance of moral seriousness that only the most ambitious novels attempt.