Sophie's Choice

This was for my book club, and since a lot of book club friends are on Goodreads, I'll hide my review under spoiler tags.

I don't need my narrators to be likeable in order to like what I'm reading. When I first started Sophie's Choice, I was like, okay Stingo, I guess you're okay as a narrator. A little bit pretentious and douchey. A try-hard writer that uses too many $20 words for no good reason. Also insanely self-centered, and thinks everyone else cares as much as he does about how much he's not getting laid.The book was good for a while. I was enjoying myself just fine. Then, I started getting irritated by his incessant, ubiquitous use of big fancy words (SEE OTHER PEOPLE CAN USE BIG WORDS TOO), and then he whined for the 4000th time how sad and terrible it is to be 22 and horny and how every woman he meets is a frigid cocktease that won't fuck him, boo-freaking-hoo, and I was basically done. I started skimming, because whining about not getting any is a) BORING, b) ANNOYING and c) BORING.And you know what? This book would have been SO much better if it had been narrated by literally any other character. You, Stingo, are totally unnecessary to this narrative, so I don't know why you're here. You're every mediocre white dude ever. I can imagine if this had been written from Sophie's broken POV, or from Nathan's manic mind, how much better it could have been. Hell, I'd have liked to see a version from Yetta's point of view, and she was barely in the novel other than owning the pink boarding house they all lived in.By the time we actually got to what Sophie actually had to make a choice about, I didn't care anymore because I was so irritated.Stingo was clearly a stand-in for Styron, and together they committed the cardinal sin of making me not want to read anything else he's ever written.