I recently managed to make it all the way through Sophie's Choice, a book I had attempted to read in college and hadn't had the maturity to finish. I loved it on my recent read so I thought I should return to Lie Down in Darkness, another book I hadn't been able to complete.

This is a very good, if not great, novel. It is also very depressing. I remember it being so depressing that I just couldn't get through it the first time (and my memory was good). All the same, the writing is beautiful and the characterizations clear and sad. In a sense, this novel is a lyrical essay on Tolstoy's quote about unhappy families from Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The novel opens on Peyton Loftis' body returning to her family on the train from New York after her suicide. Styron ranges back and forth in time and point of view throughout the novel in presenting the causes of Peyton's depression and suicide.

Peyton Loftis is the template for a particular kind of doomed Southern girl - beautiful with Daddy issues and a dozen bad habits, the kind of girl certain kinds of boys fall in love with but never marry. She is in some ways a very old-fashioned character - very much of her own generation. Reading her will make you grateful that our mothers' generation fought the feminist battles and gave us options beyond attending Sweet Briar and marrying the first fraternity boy that crossed our path. I think it's a wonder more intelligent and creative women didn't cut their own throats in the public square out of sheer boredom.

I'd like to say that all the changes in the status of women in the last 50 or so years have made the Peyton Loftises of the world obsolete, but that would be untrue. There are still plenty of boxes for both women and men to be confined to and political and societal change don't necessarily eliminate them.

I'm glad I made it through this one this time. It is, as I said, a good novel. I can strongly relate to all the flavors of despair that Styron depicts and truly felt the presence of his own depression throughout the novel. Styron is wonderfully flamboyant with language and character, even when weighed down with his own demons. ( )

William Styron's first novel is often overlooked because "Sophie's Choice" is, without doubt, his flagship; however, his style in "Lie Down in Darkness" is as melancholy and forceful as it was in each of his subsequent novels. No reader can leave these pages unmoved by the depth of suffering, both self-imposed and due to other forces, of its principal characters. The family unit is rife with undercurrents and has no opportunity to become functional because the parents are so deeply involved with their own problems. I disliked Helen the most. Her passive aggressive martyrdom fueled her husband's neuroses and alcoholism until their relationship became Faulknerian in its dysfunction. Styron's well-known bouts of depression obviously inspired much of the insights into mental illness. The pain of these characters is palpable throughout the booik. ( )

powerful story of a southern family doomed to disintegration and death. Father awash in alcohol, mother in martyrdom, one daughter handicapped, the other destroyed by her mother's jealously and hatred, her father's smothering dependence and semisexual love. Poetic, evocative of Virginia during the second word war. Sometimes hard to read but worth it. ( )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_... ( )