The Sophie Horowitz Story by Sarah Schulman

The Sophie Horowitz Story Reviews

• 
  Ocean

  this book has pretty much everything i like: weirdness, dykes, a critique of our oppressive government, and the occasional one-liner that is so brilliant i nearly fall off my damn chair. sarah schulman is pretty much the only person who writes books that i can genuinely relate to. she makes me homesick.
• 
  Megan

  Sarah Schulman is probably the most widely acclaimed writer on our list, mostly because her novels are more literary than most and get reviewed by major publications. After having read The Sophie Horowitz Story, I understand why. The book is a gem. Although I suspect that Schulman set out to write a simple literary novel about the women’s movement in New York in the early 1980s, the fact that it includes a mystery brings up the average quality of lesbian mysteries.
  
  The plot is not a simple one. A bank is robbed by two women who were early and very vocal activists in the feminist movement. One is captured by police; the other goes on the lam. Sophie Horowitz is assigned to write a story about the missing woman and in the process becomes obsessed with locating her.
  
  Here are the good things about this book: everything.
  Here are the bad things about this book: nothing.
  
  Although Sophie is a staunch feminist, who—despite her youth—is often called upon to speak at meetings and attend conferences, she is not above poking fun at some of the excesses in the movement. The missing woman, Laura Wolfe, was once, for instance, head of a group called Women Against Bad Things, which seems to encompass pretty much everything. Call it mild satire and credit Shulman’s sensitively drawn main character for the ability to get her likeably wry personality across.
  
  Unlike almost every lesbian protagonist I have encountered, Sophie prefers to date straight women. As she says, “Nothing beats the pure pleasure of watching them experience women in such an immense way for the first time.” The straight woman in question is Laura Wolf’s college roommate, who Sophie finds intriguing and lusts after. “I wanted to kiss her. We looked at each other. I wanted to kiss her soft so she would know what that’s like and then kiss her hard so she wouldn’t think that soft was the only option.”
  
  Way too rarely is a book enjoyable just for the way its words are arranged on a page and for the meanings and the feelings they engender. Here’s Sophie’s take on writing, for instance. “Writing, it’s like making love. First you dream about it and then one day it finally happens and it’s nothing like you imagined.” Or women: “The world is full of these brilliant, beautiful, delicious women and all I want to do is love them and be good to them.”
  
  So what’s to review? Sometimes it’s enough just to let the author’s words speak for themselves. Not only does this book elevate the standard of the genre, it makes some of the other—way more popular—books seem like they were written by rank amateurs. The on-the-run story calls up memories of M.F. Beal’s Amazon One, while the story is squarely in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Put this one on your Top 25 list, like I have.
  
  Note: This review is included in my book
  The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel, along with information on over 930 other lesbian mysteries by over 310 authors.
• 
  Macartney

  I've lived in NYC for almost 16 years, but my goal in life is to live in the New York City of a Sarah Schulman novel. While Schulman's first novel isn't perfect, it's remarkably impressive and delicious. It's also very funny. Full of the bravado of a youthful writer, it nonetheless explores the same themes and subject matters that she continues to write about to this day. Reading it from the vantage point of 30+ years later, it's almost shocking how consistent she has remained. While she has obviously improved as a writer and a novelist, like a diamond shaped and buffed over the years, her core essence was here at the beginning.
• 
  Melinda

  The writing wasn't great, I wasn't enthralled by the plot, but I liked the vivid assortment of characters, mainly women, and the glimpse into life and feminism in the early 1980s. I also appreciated the storyline about the homophobia of her conservative, Jewish family — which, if semi-autobiographical, I suspect is a theme she expands on in her nonfiction book on familial homophobia, which is on my to-read list.
• 
  Judy

  Quirky and funny. a few digs at the tobacco industry too !
• 
  Shelbs

  cool!
• 
  Bryan Cebulski

  I'm not sure if I understood anything about the actual plot, but this is a brilliant portrait of a New York landscape from a Jewish lesbian perspective. Hilarious and absurd and pithy in all the right ways. Schulman's work has always felt extremely ahead of its time. And very here for Sophie's food choices.
• 
  Maryn Anderson

  god I love lesbians so much that this book made me forget that I don't like mysteries (same goes for Maggie Terry as well)
• 
  Kim Lex

  “And there‘s also the thrill, every time, of knowing that everything in the world tried to stop this woman next to you in bed from being there, but she got through anyway, only because she wanted to and had decided to.“ (p. 108)
• 
  Jeremy Preacher

  I picked this up from a general recommendation list of lesbian fiction - it's not the sort of book I'd come across in the normal course of my library ramblings. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.
  
  It's probably insulting to the author to say this, but this book reminded me of nothing more than Janet Evanovich's slapstick-romance series. A very loose plot, lots of seriously wacky characters, and plenty of truly absurd situations. There are some interesting insights into the nature of revolutionaries and how they prioritize the abstract over the human, but overall it just felt wacky.
  
  I can totally see how this was a groundbreaking book in 1984 - now, it's just not that special.
• 
  Travis

  Sophie is a reporter caught up in a story about radical feminists Germaine Covington and Laura Wolf. The more she tries to get to the bottom of things, the more she finds herself tangled up in everything.[return][return]This is Schulman's first novel and it's very obvious. It's not nearly as well-written as the other books I've read by her and the plot's a little muddled and everyone but Sophie feels more like a prop than an actual person, but I still enjoyed it quite a lot. I'm glad this wasn't the first book I read by her, though.
• 
  B. Hallward

  A misguided and badly executed attempt at both satire and detective fiction. The underlying concept of combining lesbian fiction with established genres would work better if the novel were even a halfway decent stab at a detective story. The humor fails often to register as humor, leaving me with a vague sense that something was probably meant to be funny. The attempt at capturing a time and place is not vivid enough to translate across intervening decades.
• 
  Paul Bryant

  This is a lesbian detective story. Yes, there are such things. Got to love those micro-genres, like Christian death metal, and hardcore handbag, slipstream steampunk, and Harry Potter S&M fanfiction (go on, google, you know you want to). Anyway I read it and I felt like a bit of a tourist but it was pretty good.
  
  It occurs to me that there's probably lesbian Christian death metal, too.
• 
  Gloss

  I think it's easy to forget how *funny* Schulman can be, in that very dry, matter-of-fact way. This is her first novel, and it's funny and packed with food references, and although she of course got better as time passed, this is a wonderful tale.
• 
  Steph

  The lack of stars is not an accident.
• 
  Holly

  Not particularly polished, but pretty fun and pretty damn witty.
• 
  Christine

  If there's one thing I love it's a lesbian dick. In this case the dick's actually an investigative reporter for the Feminist News, and she's on the case of Germaine Covington and Laura Wolfe, two radical feminist activists with wildly different back stories who appear to have robbed a bank together. But why? As our philosophical dick Sophie Horowitz tracks down the scoop, she also ruminates on feminist, lefty, and queer political movements, smokes every cigarette brand known to man, fucks her part-time lover, thinks about seducing a straight woman, hangs out with punk dykes and activist dykes and academia dykes, deals with her homophobic family, and fondly remembers getting it on behind the curtain in shul. Published in 1984, lots of the issues with feminist, left and queer organizing remain the same...