Books, Arts & Manners: Harrowed Heroine, Harassed Audience

Suffering through the 157 minutes of pretentiousness and boredom that make up Alan J. Pakula’s movie version of Sophie’s Choice, I drew what consolation I could from having merely skimmed William Styron’s underlying novel rather than wasting many more hours reading it. In his forthcoming book, The American Novel and the Way We Live Now, John W. Aldredge persuasively demolishes Styron’s novel, and concludes that “with all its pretensions to literary majorness, Sophie’s Choice is clearly a phony book, as imaginatively inauthentic as it is intellectually without content.” Aldredge points out that the terrible choice (an SS officer at Auschwitz threatened to have both of Sophie’s children gassed unless she picked out one to be saved) was forced on the heroine, so that “the culpability belonged to the officer and not to her.”

Aldredge may be a mite too rational here, but he is right in saying that Sophie’s sin, if sin there was—it was, after all, the only way of saving even one child is too venial, and was expiated by many horrors undergone, not the least of which was the heroine’s offering herself to Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, in exchange for her surviving child’s life, being refused by him, and having that child perish too. A refugee in America, sick and starving, Sophie, a Polish Catholic, is rescued by Nathan Landau, ostensibly a biological researcher making important discoveries. By the time they are living together, however, Nathan has become viciously doubtful of her, and his beatings are as violent as their lovemaking, even though he knows nothing of her “guilty” past.

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John Simon

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Suffering through the 157 minutes of pretentiousness and boredom that make up Alan J. Pakula’s movie version of Sophie’s Choice, I drew what consolation I could from having merely skimmed William Styron’s underlying novel rather than wasting many more hours reading it. In his forthcoming book, The American Novel and the Way We Live Now, John W. Aldredge persuasively demolishes Styron’s novel, and concludes that “with all its pretensions to literary majorness, Sophie’s Choice is clearly a phony book, as imaginatively inauthentic as it is intellectually without content.” Aldredge points out that the terrible choice (an SS officer at Auschwitz threatened to have both of Sophie’s children gassed unless she picked out one to be saved) was forced on the heroine, so that “the culpability belonged to the officer and not to her.”

Aldredge may be a mite too rational here, but he is right in saying that Sophie’s sin, if sin there was—it was, after all, the only way of saving even one child is too venial, and was expiated by many horrors undergone, not the least of which was the heroine’s offering herself to Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, in exchange for her surviving child’s life, being refused by him, and having that child perish too. A refugee in America, sick and starving, Sophie, a Polish Catholic, is rescued by Nathan Landau, ostensibly a biological researcher making important discoveries. By the time they are living together, however, Nathan has become viciously doubtful of her, and his beatings are as violent as their lovemaking, even though he knows nothing of her “guilty” past.