Darkness Visible by William Styron
The title – Darkness Visible : A Memoir of Madness – makes this book sound a lot more interesting than it is. The two books I’ve read by Styron before (Shopie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner) were wonderful, but it seems Styron does a better job imagining how his characters might feel than relaying how he himself actually felt.
The book is short and flat. It describes, with surprisingly little detail, a period of depression in his life from which he recovered. Although he tells us that this depression was horrifyingly painful and debilitating, he’s only telling us that. We don’t see it or feel it. A talented auto-biographer could make shopping for a pair of shoes more suspenseful and absorbing than this was. It was a disappointment.
Who reviews these things on Amazon? Do you think they’ve actually read the book?