REVIEWS 77late their jaded palates.... They have
been cheated and betrayed. They
have slaved and saved for nothing.West and Stone both employ a
form of lyrical, sour wit that is omni-
present but often just below the radar:
you can feel it working its way
through the plot like a demonic influ-
ence, but you can’t quite pinpoint its
origin. As Bell writes, contrasting
Stone with Norman Mailer, Stone
was “an artist of extreme indirection.”Where Mailer liked to butt into the big
issues of his time head-on, Stone was
more inclined to ambush them. Stone’s
work included a take on most of the
seismic social changes of his time, but
as an artist he was less interested in
political and cultural events per se
than in the movements of chthonic
forces underlying them.Stone’s fiction is not uplifting and
cheerful, nor does it make you feel
better about yourself. It offers, instead,
narratives of disillusion, in which we
discover what we really are.B
ell knew and obviously loved
Robert Stone. His lengthy and
detailed biography, whose pub-
lication arrives at the same time as the
reissue of three of Stone’s novels in a
Library of America edition, views its
subject with an offhand, tolerant af-
fection. Stone is called “Bob” all the
way through, liquor is often referred to
as “grog,” and very little critical dis-
tance exists between the biographer
and his subject.
This devotion softens, slightly, the
harrowing narrative of Stone’s early
life. If misfortune constitutes a writer’s
gift from the gods, Stone was remark-
ably blessed. An only child, born in
Brooklyn in 1937 to a schizophrenic
or bipolar mother and an absent fa-
ther (“I really don’t know who he
was,” Stone once said), he lived with
his mother in a succession of single-
room-occupancy hotels and shelters
around New York. After fleeing to
Chicago and then returning to New
York, they briefly lived on the rooftop
of an apartment building on Lexing-
ton Avenue. During some of this
time, Stone was enrolled in a Catho-
lic school run by the Marist brothers,
St. Ann’s Academy, which he laterveyed in a tone that has the odd
property of being both frightening
and disconcertingly funny. In this
particular mode, Stone was unsur-
passed, and at least two of his novels,
A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge
Reach (1992), about an amateur sailor
who enters a solo race around the
world, have a political scope, elo-
quence, and cultural knowingness
that qualifies them as great novels.
Mania rules in many American
classics. Like it or not, in what has
been taken to be our national litera-
ture, the notable white male charac-
ters are often in the grip of obses-
sion. From Captain Ahab, to Frank
Nor ris’s McTeague, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby,
Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, Nabo-
kov’s Humbert Humbert, Philip
Roth’s Portnoy, and James McBride’s
John Brown, we are in the presence
of men who want only one thing and
have sold their souls to get it. These
people are outcasts of one sort or an-
other. They can be polite, but polite
society is nothing to them. They are
visionaries in the best and worst
ways, and when they self-destruct, as
they usually do, they take others
with them.
Given this set of conditions, the
truest literary ancestor of Robert
Stone may be Nathanael West, whose
novel The Day of the Locust (1939)
concludes with a riot that may have
been the model for the violent
Trumpian rally at the end of A Hall of
Mirrors. Here is West’s description of
the rioting crowd:
They were savage and bitter, especially
the middle-aged and the old, and had
been made so by boredom and disap-
pointment. All their lives they had
slaved at some kind of dull, heavy la-
bor, behind desks and counters, in the
fields and at tedious machines of all
sorts, saving their pennies and dream-
ing of the leisure that would be
theirs.... Where else should they go
but California, the land of sunshine
and oranges?... They get tired of or-
anges.... They watch the waves come
in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean
where most of them came from, but af-
ter you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen
them all.... [Newspapers and movies]
fed them on lynchings, murder, sex
crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests,
fires, miracles, revolutions, wars....
The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titil-described, in a story, as having “the
social dynamic of a coral reef.”
“Everybody was very unhappy there,”
Stone remembered. “[The Marist
brothers] certainly slapped people
around right and left.” His sense of op-
pression never quite left him, nor did
the compulsion to find an escape hatch.
Along the way, he learned Latin, a gift
that stayed with him as an adult, and
he read poetry in Latin for pleasure.
The other details of Stone’s upbringing
are dispiriting: in adolescence, he re-
peatedly showed up to school drunk,
joined a New York street gang, and was
expelled in the middle of his senior
year. At the age of seventeen, he joined
the Navy.
Stone found the Navy a step up in
civility, despite his experience of
fighting off a rape aboard ship by us-
ing a chain to defend himself. In
1956, having been sent to Port Said
on the U.S.S. Chilton at the outbreak
of the Suez Crisis, Stone saw the
corpses of Egyptians killed by French
bombers floating in the water. The
sight seems to have been a turning
point of sorts. Years later, he de-
scribed his response to it: “I always
thought that the world was filled
with evil spirits, that people’s minds
teemed with depravity and craziness
and weirdness and murderousness,
that that basically was an implicit
condition, an incurable condition of
mankind.” That same night in
Egypt, he recalled, he had this in-
sight: “This is the way it is. There is
no cure for this. There is only one
thing you can do with this. You can
transcend it. You can take it and
make it art.”
Stone’s lifelong challenge was to
find ways of slipping the wildest and
most frenzied visions into what
seemed like plausible narratives, and
his greatness as a writer is a reflec-
tion of how often he succeeded. Near
the end of Stone’s Outerbridge Reach,
for example, the book’s protagonist,
Owen Browne, is stranded on an “icy
stone island” in the Southern Hemi-
sphere after his shoddily made boat
falls to pieces during the race. By
now “in the grip of something pow-
erful and unsound,” he enters an
abandoned house and feels some-
thing “trying to direct his attention
toward the window.” The sentences