Lie Down in Darkness

by William Styron

Book Overview

William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities--the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love--that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679735976
• ISBN13: 9780679735977
• Release Date: March 1992
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Hauntingly Beautiful, Yet Painful Novel

Before I read the novel Lie Down in Darkess, I read commentary which said that Merle Miller, a noted critic of the time, could not finish the last eighty pages because of beautiful and doomed tragedy of it all. The day I finished Styron's Lie Down in Darkess, it occurred to me that I should stop writing because none of my prose would ever be this amazingly poetic. Lie Down in Darkess is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. Milton Loftis, the main character, is not a protagonist because he is not our hero, although we certainly spend time hoping that he might find a middle ground between his shrewish wife, his alcoholic excesses and the heartbreak of his feelings for his oldest daughter Peyton. Milton Loftis is a man trapped in a Greek tragedy who blunders on every day, balancing his illusions and hoping for the best, although he, and we, the readers, see the foreboding clouds which spell certain doom from the beginning of the book. Helen, the bitter, hypocritical wife, clothes herself in the self righteous delusions of religiosity and spends most of her energy with the mentally incapacitated daughter Maudie. She pretends that Milton is a profligate sinner and adulterer who has made it his life's work to torture her, ignoring that her icy civility and the obvious hatred of her own daughter has been the prod to his loveless and licentious life style. Milton Loftis finds some modicum of hope in his sad affair with Dolly Bonner, but that and whisky are only ways to escape an insufferable existence he cannot escape and cannot understand. He is not weak enough to die, and he is not strong enough to flee. Admittedly, I am a stylist of the Faulknerian, Reynolds Price persuasion, so I found the haunting beauty of this novel enough to recommend it to other readers. I understand that is my bias, but I stand by that verdict. The more people who read this great book, the more awareness of life's inexorable twists, and, hopefully, the more aware we become of the pain of others, and the more committed we become to tolerance and forgiveness.

This MASTERPIECE of writing,

made me grateful about those long, boring afternoons spent in learning English!I just read all the reviews: Some were written by real experts. But some of them depict this novel as "too long" (I WISHED IT WOULD HAVE BEEN LONGER!")"boring" (This lady is far of understanding any book: This book is a living proof of the geniality of Styron : He is capable of describing the most shining and also the most heinous feelings of a character. Styron strips the characters and drive us to watch them as they really are. This is one of the most soul tearing book ever...and the argument is unique, BRUTAL, TERRIFYNG and BEATIFUL1

A sad but affecting book

William Styron is likely the greatest novelist no one has ever heard of. His name is even less recognizable than Faulkner's, or other great American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc. And yet, in my opinion, his works are far superior. With only four novels to choose from out of his career he has made it very difficult for himself to be regarded in those terms, but he has still achieved a wide amount of critical acclaim, with a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award to his credit.His novels are not light novels. They are not coffee table books, but a rather serious discussions on moral issues written with an eloquence that is unmatched in modern writing.Lie Down in Darkness is his first novel, and is much like what I have just said. As a first novel it is necessarily experimental, although the effect of this experimentation is at times hard to tell.Following through flashback the trials of one Virginia family on the day of their daughter's funeral, Lie Down in Darkness leads up to the present, describing in tragic terms how the family has come apart and where it is now.This is great writing, some of the best writing I have ever read, as realistic as any Dickens novel, and as engaging as anything by Baldwin.It is not a happy book, but it is the best book I have read about the American family, far greater and relevant than anything I have read by Morrison.

Lie Down In Darkness perfects Southern Gothic

Lie Down In Darkness, Styron's first novel, published when he was just 22, is a masterpiece of psychological realism and storytelling in the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Conner. That it was created by such a young mind is testament to the author's genius; that it has yet to be rivaled as a stirring, oftentimes painful and disturbing portrait of a doomed family, is testament to the writing. Composed with thick, purposeful prose, heavy on similie, metaphor and description, the novel charts the rise and fall of the Loftis Family, an archetypal rendering of the Soutnern Gentry. We follow the tragic downfall of Milton, the drunken patriarch, Ellen, the frigid mother, and the two Loftis daughters, one born perfect, one born crippled. It is a novel of abundant ontological truth, which will reach in and strangle the unconscious sensibilities of almost any reader, regardless of background or predispotition. The novel's beauty ranks with the prose of Lawrence, the passion of Rimbaud and Kundera, the depth and spiritual metaphysics of Doestoyevsky; It is both story and case study. And ultimately we are shepherded through tragedy after tragedy into the climax--the suicide of the immeasurably beautiful and desired Peyton Loftis--as we walk moment to moment with her, peering inside the poisoned stream of consciousness that overwhelms and eventually claims her. Lie Down In Darkness belongs in the canon of Great American Masterpieces. It's significance has only begun to be understood.

Beautiful, wrenching, impossible to put down.

Never have I wanted to pound some sense into fictional characters as when I read William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. The Loftiss family saga is sometimes hard to read because they hurt each other so easily and so often. But Styron's language is beautiful, and his understanding of the characters is deep. The account of Peyton's last day is especially heartbreaking and revealing. In short, this novel is one of my favorites simply because of its account of human frailty and the amazing way in which the story is told. Styron is one of the best.