Word: styron
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WILLIAM STYRON looks at you from the back of the book jacket, a little mean perhaps, a little puffy from too much hard living, but secure, very secure, the security of reputation and seven-figure movie rights for Sophie's Choice. It is the Big Book, over 500 pages and therefore serious, Styron's first novel since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Confessions of Nat Turner. Everyone wants to write a Big Book. Ask Norman Mailer...
...Styron tells his story through Stingo, an aspiring Tidewater writer who has come to New York in search of literary fame and fortune. He settles in a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets Nathan and Sophie, obsessive lovers, Olympic sexual athletes, and partners in mental disease. In its particulars, Sophie's Choice evokes Styron's own experience as a young writer struggling with hisfirst novel; in its overall scheme, it is Stingo's Bildungsroman, the story of a young man travelling north and discovering the nature of evil...
...have ever admired Styron's technique, and all the tedious overwriting remains intact, the words like "thaumaturges" and "matutinal," the heavy-handed imagery: "A truck's wheel striking a pothole on the street made a clamor like the slamming of the gates of hell." These characters talk a lot, long bloated monologues that go on for pages. And there's at least one passage that has no place in a hardcover of any kind, much less a major novel...
...might go further and say, as Roger Rosenblatt has suggested, that the book is hollow because Styron doesn't understand evil. Certainly, Styron wanted to write a book about evil; the ambition is palpable in the novel's heft. But I suspect it was an intellectual desire, not a visceral one, that it did not spring from a central concern in Styron's life. What kind of evil, after all, do you find on Martha's Vineyard? There are long sections of secondary history, and extensive quotations from people like Hannah Arendt, passages that seem tacked-on, contrived. The characters...
...Sophie's Choice, Styron (I last week...