It is not hard to see why William Styron made the Modern Library 100 Best Novels List. His writing, in my opinion, is superlative. It just flows. With some books and some authors there is a sort of self consciousness about their writing, but there is none of that here. I am actually not very far into the novel at all, but I almost don't want to read it too quickly. I feel like pacing myself so I can savor it. The narrator, Stingo, is a young Southerner who is working for McGraw-Hill, who will meet and become involved in the lives of Sophie and Nathan (sorry, am just getting to this part in my reading). Although he is twenty-two when the story occurs, he is actually much older when telling the story--there is a certain maturity to his voice as well. It is hard to choose a passage to share, so I will start at the beginning:
"In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebb. At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down for the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or--to approximate Gertrude Stein's remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation--I had the syrup but it wouldn't pour."
--Sophie's Choice, William Styron