Onion Skins 
 If you are able to read this masterpiece for the first time without pre-categorizing it into a particular genre, let alone knowing the background of the title character or the nature of her "choice," count yourself lucky. One of the delights of the book--and I do mean delights--is the way that Styron reveals his secrets so gradually, peeling away surfaces like the skins of an onion. The first hint of the horrors that lurk in the background comes as early as page 54 of the Vintage edition, but the meaning of the title is not revealed until the penultimate chapter, almost 500 pages later. In between, the tension builds as detail after detail emerges, but the story also warms and deepens as the reader gets to know the people better. Despite its background in death, Sophie's Choice is also triumphantly a novel about life. 
 Many reviewers on Amazon have written something to the effect of "I put off reading this because I knew it would be depressing, but it was worth it." But suppose you had no such assumption; you would find a book that is often laugh-aloud funny, in its opening chapters at least, and shot through to the end with a pervasive eroticism. For despite the title, the Polish refugee Sophie is not the principal character. This honor is given to the narrator, a 22-year-old writer from the South, nicknamed Stingo but clearly the author himself, come up to try his luck in the big city. After a hilariously inappropriate stint as a blurb-writer for a Manhattan publisher, he comes into a little money and moves into a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets Sophie and her lover Nathan Landau. Although writing in the middle of his career, Styron deliberately adopts the tone of the coming-of-age novel, and absolutely nails the genre. Even without the story of Sophie and Nathan, this would still figure as a significant American novel, a sort of post-grad version of Catcher in the Rye, perfectly capturing that moment of uneasy balance between a vanished past and an uncertain future that was America in 1947. When he is not writing deathless prose or fantasizing about getting laid, Stingo is absorbing a rapid education about the real world, an education that is more multi-faceted than any synopsis might have you believe. On one level, this is a book about the writing process: the attempt to assimilate and make sense of information and emotions coming at you from all sides. I can think of few other books that convey such a convincing sense of what it means to be a writer. 
 Of course I am aware that to describe Sophie's Choice in terms of post-adolescent comedy is like asking "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" For what lies behind Sophie's story is of a different scale altogether than anything that Stingo might experience at first hand. As he gets to know these people and glimpse their traumas, Stingo also comes face to face with the existence of pure evil. We see him struggle to encompass the unthinkable, to explain the inexplicable, to empathize with somebody who has faced moral dilemmas most of us can barely imagine. Styron approaches this by frequent shifts of time-period and voice, now having Stingo write as the naive observer caught up in events, now as the objective historian years after the fact. This multiple perspective creates a moral prism in which all kinds of issues are refracted: race and creed, the legacy of slavery, North and South, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, prudery and sexual liberation, and the challenge to religious belief. If assigned into a category as I mentioned earlier, Sophie's Choice would stand as one of the most powerful treatments of its subject in international literature. It also remains one of the richest and most thought-provoking novels about American life and morality written in the postwar period.