Thanks for the hair replies! I figured it was an old wives' tale, and that cut hair gives them impression of being thicker because it looks tidier and blunter, IYSWIM. I shall not cut DD's hair, then!
Essay ahead - please ignore if you''ve not read Sophie's Choice!!!!!!
Ok. So I finally finished it. I'm really surprised that it was considered such an excellent novel, TBH (won an award, or something?). Overall, my opinion is quite negative.
Thoughts in no particular order:
- I think it was largely over-written. For instance, you could've culled thousands of adjectives from the novel, and made it more direct, more immediate, less fussy. I know he references Faulkner, who piles up adjectives a lot in his fiction, but, frankly, Faulkner's uses of adjectives are much more original and strange: this just felt overdone and pompous. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt, as I suggested before, to convey the younger Stingo's style; or to give a sense of the superfluity of it all. But I found it irritating and self-important. If this was deliberate, then it leads me on to my second point;
- I found Stingo totally unsympathetic and unlikeable. While I think that some novels do want you to feel alienated by or dislike towards the protagonist (e.g. American Psycho; one could even think of Catcher in the Rye, but Stingo lacks this character's charisma), here I got the impression that Styron wants you to feel somewhat sympathetic towards the naive young Stingo, and see his tale as a kind of Bildungsroman, but Styron is no Goethe, and I found Stingo self-absorbed, bigoted/racist, misogynistic.
In fact, there was - in general - a rather misogynistic streak running through the book: the Leslie Lapidus and Maria Hunt episodes were - on the whole - horrible. I found their sexual politics utterly horrifying; perhaps this is more a reflection of modern mores; but I'm not sure. Moreover, the entire portrayal of Sophie left a rather foul taste in one's mouth: you couldn't help feeling that - as she herself seems to imply - she "deserves" the treatment she receives from Nathan.
Which again reminds me: Sophie - ostensibly the main character after Stingo - is really poorly characterised. I couldn't say now whether she was a kind person, or funny, or anything: her characterisation was so weak, that I wasn't left with a strong impression of her; only of the things she does or what happens to her. I got a stronger impression of peripheral characters - like Leslie Lapidus, or Wanda - than I did of Sophie.
On the other hand, Nathan is over-characterised, perhaps in counterpoise to Sophie. He emerges as by far the most interesting character, despite the story which is supposed to be the foundation of the tale - namely Sophie's experiences of the holocaust. In fact, I was left wishing Styron would write more about what I thought was an interesting and novel idea: namely, Nathan's intense interest in European anti-semitism and his indirect sense of personal outrage coupled with his having "missed" the war. However, Styron completely passed the buck on this one by making Nathan mad (paranoid schizophrenic? how unoriginal!), and thus rendering all his quirks pathologies.
Styron litters his stories with apparently necessary asides (he constantly says "to understand the next part of Sophie's tale, you have to know the following story"). Nearly all of these seem totally irrelevant to the main thrust of the story, and far from giving the novel depth and richness, or even from giving the novel a kind of superfluity (again, perhaps Styron was aiming for the "enormity" of the tale angle), these episodes derail Sophie's story, and make it lose its dynamic horror. E.g. the Duerrfeld (the industrialist) episode (which only serves to sexualise Sophie further for no apparent reason).
The lesbian obsession was also a bit much. Yes, obviously there would've been such events, but I felt that Styron's inclusion of these was more voyeuristic, almost pornographic, than anything else.
This voyeurism/pornography I found distasteful, TBH. I know there is a kind of Eros/Thanatos thing going on, but he seemed only to be able to do the Eros, and mishandled the Thanatos, I thought.
The defining episode - Sophie's Choice - is so bafflingly badly handled that I was totally amazed. He intersects the scene between Stingo's absurd romantic dreams of Sophie coming to be his wife in Virginia, which obviously is meant to represent and illustrate Stingo's utter incapacity to deal with the horror of Sophie's life and thus be dramatic and stark in its opposition of tone, etc. However, it just made the episode flat and trivialised, IMO.
Also, I found that Styron was - basically - unable to face up to the very subject of his novel: the holocaust. OK, he makes that point himself (e.g. referencing Steiner - the unspeakability of the holocaust, etc.), but if you're going to write a bloody novel about it...! What I mean is, he writes about Auschwitz, but obviously wants to duck writing about the Jewish experience of it (to controversial, politically dangerous, maybe), so he tries to play a clever trick and write about a Pole who is treated like a Jew, IYSWIM. This maybe gave him "permission" to imagine the holocaust, but it felt weak to me. Plus, I must admit, I do have an inherent anxiety about the overt fictionalisation of Auschwitz: placing Sophie in, for instance, the path of Hoess, felt ungainly and crass.
The comparative theme of the racism of the South/anti-Semitism of Europe was, I suppose, meant to make you reflect on the universal nature of human evil; just as the choice of Sophie (everywoman) was supposed to make you reflect on the universal nature of human suffering. But this fell flat and was rather patronising, and threatened to trivialise.
I'm sure I have more things to say, but this is more than enough for now!!!!
Sorry those of you not reading SC!