Everyone familiar with the shameful media treatments of Nazidom over the years has to have felt an obligation to protest…. But I wouldn't have predicted that, among American fictionists of established reputation, the author of Set This House on Fire would have been the figure who met that obligation. And certain signs in Sophie's Choice suggest that Styron isn't entirely at ease in his role. (p. 77)

A long narrative (more than 500 oversized, tightly printed pages), circumstantially detailed, Sophie's Choice has defects as a work of fiction. About many events in the heroine's life the narrator has no direct knowledge, which means that Sophie must tell all, slipping into a volubility awkward in someone first presented as a human being of style and dignity. (Stingo asks us to believe that a taste for American bourbon, rather than a spell of the novelistic clumsies, lies behind Sophie's garrulousness, but he's...