[Sophie's Choice] is divided into two parts that are not very closely stitched together. The Stingo-Sophie-Nathan relationship is one part, Sophie's life in Auschwitz as she tells it to Stingo the other, and the Auschwitz passages are much more vivid and convincing than the scenes from American life circa 1947. If the camps cannot be satisfactorily treated in terms of Zolaesque naturalism (no novelist has yet succeeded in this), what technique can suggest their horror, and convey something of the terrible new world in which the prisoners lived? Mr. Styron's approach reminded me sometimes of Lina Wertmuller's film Seven Beauties in showing horror through grotesque comedy, and in stressing the individual's determination to survive at the cost of others….

[The] Auschwitz scenes are meant to throw their shadow forward to the present. The choice made by Sophie is not only to lose her daughter for her son, but also...