Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first novel, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing.
While working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship.
She describes her violently antisemitic father, a law professor in Kraków; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned.
She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child.
Sylvie Mathé notes that Styron's "position" in the writing of this novel was made clear in his contemporary interviews and essays, in the latter case, in particular "Auschwitz", "Hell Reconsidered", and "A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle",[2] and quotes Alvin Rosenfeld's summary of Styron's position, where Rosenfeld states that:[3] (1) while [Styron] acknowledges Jewish suffering under the Nazis, he insists on seeing Auschwitz in general or universalistic terms, as a murderous thrust against "mankind" or "the entire human family"; (2) in line with the above, he sees his own role as "correcting" the view that the Holocaust was directed solely or exclusively against the Jews by focusing attention on the many Christians, and particularly the Slavs, who also perished in the camps; (3) … Auschwitz was "anti-Christian" as well as "anti-Semitic", and hence assertions of Christian guilt are misplaced and perhaps even unnecessary; (4) since he rejects historical explanations of Christian anti-Semitism as causative, Styron is drawn to the view, set forth by Richard Rubenstein and others … that in its essential character Auschwitz was a capitalistic slave society as much as or even more than it was an extermination center; and (5) viewed against European examples of barbarism and slavery, epitomized by Auschwitz, the American South's treatment of the blacks looks pretty good and "… seems benevolent by comparison".
"[3]: 44 Mathé reinforces Rosenfeld's conclusion with a quote from Styron himself, who stated in his "Hell Reconsidered" essay that "the titanic and sinister forces at work in history and in modern life… threaten all men, not only Jews.
"[4]: 114 She goes on to note that Styron's choices to represent these ideas, and to incorporate them so clearly into the narrative of his novel, resulted in polemic and controversy that continued, at least into the early years of the new millennium.
[7] A central element of the novel's plot, the personally catastrophic choice referred to in the title, is said to have been inspired by a story of a Romani woman who was ordered by the Nazis to select which of her children was to be murdered, which Styron attributes[citation needed] to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In his review of the novel in the New York Times, John Gardner takes it as an example of Southern Gothic,[dubious – discuss] writing that:[It] is a splendidly written, thrilling book, a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the 20th century.
"[2] Mathé says: Styron's ideological and narrative choices in his framing of a novel touching upon the "limit events" of Auschwitz, considered by many to lie beyond the realm of the imagination… spurred a polemic… which, twenty-five years later, is far from having died down.
[15]) The controversy to which Mathé is specifically referring arises from a thematic analysis which—in apparent strong consensus (e.g., see Rosenfeld's 1979 work, "The Holocaust According to William Styron"[3])—has Styron, through the novel, his interviews, and essays: Speaking of Styron's views as set forth in the novel and his nonfiction work, Rosenfeld refers to them as "revisionist views" that "culminate in Sophie's Choice" with an aim to "take the Holocaust out of Jewish and Christian history and place it within a generalized history of evil",[3]: 44 and it is this specific revisionist thrust that is the substance of the novel's initial and persisting ability to engender controversy.
[22] The following of Styron's works have been collected, per Sylvie Mathé, as relevant to the author's philosophical framework with regard to his constructing the history and characters within his novel.