Volume 26, Number 12 · July 19, 1979
Stingo's Story
By Robert Towers
Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
Random House, 515 pp., $12.95
Once again William Styron has ended a protracted literary silence by the publication of an ambitious book on an overwhelmingly important subject. As with The Confessions of Nat Turner, which came out in 1967 before the Vietnam War overtook the civil rights movement as the leading preoccupation of liberal America, the timing is propitious. For one of the aims of Sophie's Choice is nothing less than to understand the Holocaust, and the book makes its appearance just when a spate of material—historical, documentary, cinematic, and fictional—has created a mass audience for what is rapidly becoming the favorite horror show of our times.
Review, 3692 words
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