Madison Smartt Bell - Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone

Robert Stone is one of the most powerful and enduring writers of the late twentieth century, also called sometimes the American Century, and in the latter aspect now thought by many to have come to an ignominious end. Stones work chronicled both the peak and the decline of a great many aspects of U.S. world dominance, as practiced abroad and reflected at home. In recounting the struggles of the particular individuals that peopled his imagination, he also told us the story of our time. Stone was an artist, not a reformer, but he had a very unusual ability to engage his fiction with the most urgent social issues of his time and ours, while living in the midst of them, and to do so without artistic compromise.

When Stone mustered out of the navy in the late 1950s, the United States had perhaps reached its zenith in terms of economic success and dominance, political hegemony worldwide, and a vibrant and vigorous culture, ripe for exportation in multiple embodiments: from serious literature and high art to B movies, pop music, and Coca-Cola. It seemed a national moment free of self-doubtalthough a considerable dysphoria would soon begin to express itself, as the social upheavals of the 1960s began. Stone, who did not begin the world from a position of privilege, was quicker than most to see the shadows cast by the rising American star. In his work, he would repeatedly portray those bright aspirations set off by a surrounding darkness which was likely in the end to devour them.

Stones novels each capture the zeitgeist of a particular period. A Hall of Mirrors slashes into the underbelly of American racial anxieties as the civil rights movement, and resistance to it, get underway. Dog Soldiers somehow captures the whole spirit of the Vietnam era while barely setting a scene in Vietnam. A Flag for Sunrise delves into the dark side of the Monroe Doctrine, following the most corrupt machinations of American influence into the bloodiest crannies of Central America. Children of Light stages the cocaine-fueled, illusion-rich culture of 1980s Hollywood. Outerbridge Reach swings the 1990s boom-and-bust stock market cycle by the tail, shaking out its scariest social consequences. Damascus Gate discovers the sinister side of the U.S. engagement with Mideast politics in general and Israel in particularamong other things, as one must always say of any Robert Stone novela great many other things. Stones fictions are all human stories, first and foremost, driven by characters invested with remarkably rich and dense inner livescharacters we are compelled to recognize as our close cousins. There but for the grace of God (or just good luck if you prefer) go we.

Bob Stone sometimes described himself as a slothful perfectionist, though his body of work conveys perfectionism more than sloth. All of his fictionmultifaceted and with unsuspected depthsrepays multiple readings, and handsomely. There is little in even the best of contemporary fiction that can claim this quality; however brilliant on the first read, it is not likely to offer fresh insights on a second. The reward Stone offers to the reader is much larger than usual, though he was genuinely hard to please and often found it hard to please himself. He was a conflicted, sometimes tormented personality in both life and art. His disposition was choleric at times; he suffered fools with very small patience, and he confronted the world with the bright, acidic irony of an extraordinarily perceptive, bitterly disappointed idealist. Although Stone was never an autobiographical novelist in the relatively narrow sense that writers like Richard Ford, Saul Bellow, and Ernest Hemingway are, some variation on his own qualities usually gets projected onto at least one major character in all of his novels (Rheinhardt in A Hall of Mirrors, Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise, Walker in Children of Light) or sometimes the Stone personality is split between two protagonists (Converse and Hicks in Dog Soldiers, Browne and Strickland in