It’s probably not possible to write a bad Holocaust book, even if the book in question is totally innocent of literary quality. Tapping into the reservoir of shock and shame that still guides our collective memory of that madness is the ultimate storytelling crutch. The Manichean reality of the camps and ghettos is so unbelievable that first-person accounts of it would read almost like a simple morality fable about the apotheosis of evil, if not for the 12,000,000 bodies that make the fable very, very real.
Against that backdrop, it’s easy to see how even unskilled hands can craft from such duality something overwhelmingly affecting. Witness Elie Wiesel’s Night. Certainly not one of the great novels I’ve read, Night is seared into memory because despite its literary faults, it describes, simply, those acts of unequivocal selflessness transpiring contemporaneously with similarly pure evil (there is no other word).
But if Holocaust literature is always an affecting experience, for a long time it suffered from being told from a single, unwavering paradigm—that of the survivor memoir. Then, in 1979, a middle-aged Virginian gentile by the name of William Styron had the audacity to publish Sophie’s Choice, one of the first (and certainly the most commercially viable) efforts of fiction to bring the Holocaust home, so to speak. Styron’s protagonist Stingo is a wide-eyed twentysomething boy, a southern gentleman-in-training living large in the Big Apple. And he experiences the Holocaust only indirectly, through the recounted memories of his fictional neighbor Sophie, memories that ultimately destroy her.
Almost immediately after its publication, Styron was attacked from more or less every corner. How dare this American, this interloper, shoehorn his way into the tragedy of tragedies that, ultimately, isn’t even his story to tell? And do so by inventing a horror amid an epoch rife with horrors already beyond imagination?
That question of “ownership” of the Holocaust is essential, I think, not only to Sophie’s Choice but to a whole bunch of other political shit that Neon Hustle strives to avoid, something I'll honor here. Suffice it to say, the cacophony of Styron’s detractors ultimately couldn’t smother what was undeniably a great novel. Partly as a consequence of Sophie's Choice, then, the Holocaust has come to be seen equally as a Jewish (and Gypsy, and Polack and Slav and homosexual and Soviet POW) experience and one that speaks to every global citizen. Speaking delicately, while you can’t really fault the survivors for defining their Holocaust experience as theirs and theirs alone, that impulse to exclude the rest of us 60 years later makes it more difficult for to appreciate, even sympathize with, what they endured.
So what makes Sophie’s Choice such a great book? Probably it’s Sophie herself. She is beautifully, brilliantly drawn, and if Styron didn’t actually know anyone like her in his too-short life, he certainly did his homework to create such a convincing character. Garrulous and withdrawn, exuberant and abject: Sophie embodies the withered dreams of her generation. This is a book I read twice through (I had erroneously assumed, being the lummox I am, that Sophie’s choice was a choice between sparing her child and herself, not a choice between saving one of her two children, a prism which undermined the experience for me the first time round. Plainly, the lesson here is to approach all things with an open mind, or at least a bare minimum of foreknowledge) and each time Sophie jumped off the page, someone you desperately want to talk to even while knowing that you’ll despair at what she has to say.
There are some faults here, of course, particularly Styron’s attempts at tying together the Holocaust and U.S. slavery. But rarely is a sweeping 600 page novel absolutely perfect. Credit Styron for aiming for the stars and getting at least as far as the moon, an accomplishment that’s still impressive 30 years on.
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