76 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020and its lowest fears and angers. “Be-
cause there is a pattern,” Bingamon
tells Rheinhardt.They feel it, they pick up a trace of it
here and there.... People can’t see
because they don’t have the orienta-
tion, isn’t that right? And a lot of
what we’re trying to do is to give
them that orientation.After A Hall of Mirrors and its mor-
dant portrait of American racial anxi-
eties, Stone’s subjects ranged widely.
Next came Dog Soldiers (1974), one of
the great Vietnam
novels, centered on
a drug deal gone
awry. With A Flag
for Sunrise (19 81),
Stone turned to
American adven-
turism in Central
America, and from
there, in Children
of Light (19 8 6), t o
the story of a
schizophrenic ac-
tress in cocaine-
addled 1980s Holly-
wood. Damascus
Gate (19 9 8) f o c u s e d
on America’s rela-
tions to the Middle
East, and particu-
larly Israel. His fi-
nal novel, Death of
the Black-Haired
Girl (2013), was a
campus thriller.
In a world ruled
by dramatic ironies
observed by ath-
letes of perception, to use one of Stone’s
key phrases, the agents of goodness and
mercy are few, and nature is no help at
all. His protagonists tend to be wild,
intelligent charmers in the grip of a
singular preoccupation. His novels
take the form of hallucinatory real-
ism, the typical narrative invariably
starting in the real world but usually
traveling to Stone’s particular version
of Oz, where things are not what they
seem and, to quote a character from A
Hall of Mirrors, “Something fucking
awful is happening all the time.” In-
tricately plotted and often suspense-
ful, his fiction tends to run a low-
grade fever generated by ambition,
racism, fear, drugs, and alcohol, con-A Hall of Mirrors (1967), a depiction,
eerily familiar in our own era, of the
far right’s use of mass media to exploit
Americans’ racist fears. The book fol-
lows a failed clarinetist named Rhein-
hardt as he goes to work as a
Limbaugh-ish political commentator
at a New Orleans radio station,
WUSA. His boss, Bingamon, a
businessman—large, tanned, and
seemingly ageless—advises his new
employee that the task of radio will
now be, and should be, the speaking
aloud of the unspeakable. Breaking
through barriers of propriety is the
way to success. To get an audience,
Bingamon asserts, you first have to
give voice to the audience’s prejudicesT
he novelist Robert Stone once
said that his subject was
“A m e r i c a a n d A m e r i c a n s .”
Indeed, as Madison Smartt Bell writes
in his new biography of Stone, Child
of Light, Stone’s fiction depicts “the
evolution of America’s sense of itself—
from the naïve ebullience of the 1950s
to the tenebrous uncertainties of the
post-9/11 twenty-first century,” and it
did so in a way that was “always just a
little ahead of the curve.”
That almost prophetic quality is
perhaps most evident in his first novel,FUN WITH PROBLEMS
The life of Robert Stone
By Charles Baxter
Discussed in this essay:Child of Light, by Madison Smartt Bell. Doubleday. 608 pages. $35.
Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach, by Robert
Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell. Library of America. 1,216 pages. $45.Charles Baxter teaches at the University of
Minnesota. His most recent short-story
collection is There’s Something I Want
You to Do.Photograph of Robert Stone © Susan Aimee Weinik/LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images