One of those books that remind me why it was a good decision to just not finish books if they fail to capture my attention. Especially in a case like this where the page count is more than 500. In theory this could have been a pretty good story, but in practice... Oh boy. The prose is quite good, but it just drowns under everything else so I can't enjoy it the same way I usually would. Styron tries to tackle with too many topics and themes all at once, none of which he can focus on completely, making the whole story confusing and meandering. It's like he had a bunch of good ideas and decided to stuff them all into one novel, even though he would have been better off just writing at least two different ones. So, instead of one epic ambitious novel, this consists of fragments of incomplete threads and only one vaguely interesting character, Nathan. And what's up with the horny musings of the self-absorbed narrator Stingo? Seriously, I couldn't care less!