Sophie's Choice - Lynn's Take

Let me tell you a story: In 1982, I was a Freshman in college.  Sometime in early October, a nice boy from one of my classes (a Sophomore!) asked me on a date - dinner and a movie.  There was nothing memorable about our dinner, but the movie we saw was Sophie's Choice (his selection).  I had no idea what the movie was about, and I doubt that he did, either.  By the end of the movie, I was sobbing so hard that snot was shooting out of my nose and I couldn't catch my breath.  The minute the movie ended, I hastily excused myself and ran back to my dorm, crying all the while.  There was no second date.

Fast forward 30 years.  Believe it or not, I decided to read Sophie's Choice because I thought it would be an "easy" read.  After all, I knew what it was about, and despite the sobbing and the snot, I was glad to have seen the movie.  And, in one sense the novel was an easy read.  William Styron's writing is unmistakably modern.  Sophie's Choice could have been written in 2012. With its explicit sexuality, its thorough secularism, and its dissassociative disapproval of the post-bellum South, modern readers will find little discomfort in the book's attitudes.

But in another, more fundamental, sense, Sophie's Choice was anything but an easy read.  In fact, it was the furthest thing from an easy read.  Emotionally, this was the most difficult book I have ever read.  And I mean that in a profoundly positive way.  Books come and books go; some are enjoyable, some are moving, some are exciting, some are thought-provoking. More than a few are duds.  But it is a rare book, a very rare book, that has the intellectual and emotional force to change your outlook on life.  And Sophie's Choice is that good. In my almost 50 years this is the only the second book of that caliber that I've had the good fortune to read.

Beyond the freshness and immediacy of Styron's writing, there are three things that most struck me as the essential messages of the novel:  

1.  Evil is not only banal, it is temporally bounded and geographically isolated. It comfortably coexists with the mundane.  Indeed, it hides in plain sight amongst the prosaic amusements, fashions, and happenings of the world.  

2.  The secret core of evil, as perpetrated by one man upon another, is its ability to encircle both the evil-doer's and the victim's lives and frame every choice as one between the lesser of two evils.

3.  Sophie's "choice" - the enormous, life-choking, horrific, unimaginable choice that Sophie was forced to make  by a Nazi guard - is surrounded by an enormous assembly of choices small and large to which  her fate could, ultimately, equally be attributed.  From stealing a ham, to failing to steal a radio; from continuing her employment with the chiropractor to returning to New York, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of choices that, differently decided, could have altered Sophie's destiny.