From a New York Times review, by Dwight Garner, of Madison Smart Bell’s book Child of Light:
Do you ever feel like the plaything of an enormous fate? Do you sense subterranean forces? Are you interested in estrangement and recrimination? Are you at home with ambiguity? Maybe the novels of Robert Stone (1937-2015) are for you.
A simmering paranoia bubbles under the surface of Stone’s fiction, a paranoia he had a sense of humor about. He once proposed an Alcoholics Anonymous-type group: “The idea was, if you’re feeling paranoid, contact Paranoids Anonymous and they’ll send you another paranoid.”
Reading “Child of Light,” a revealing new biography of Stone by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, Stone’s distrust begins to make sense. He was not inherently a wild man, but he attracted wildness. It came to him, as if he were coaxing it out of the soil. He fed off the destructive energy. . . .
At Stanford, Stone ran into Ken Kesey, whose vibrating homesteads were the mudrooms and test labs of the Woodstock generation. Stone felt he’d stepped out of black and white and into color. Here was strong pot, free love, spectral amusements, acid trips and epic intellection that no one remembered in the morning. “I felt I went to a party in ’63,” Stone later told an interviewer, “and the party followed me out the door and filled the world.”. . .
Stone had an intense work ethic. His first novel, “A Hall of Mirrors,” was published in 1967 when he was 30. Set in New Orleans, where Stone and his wife had briefly lived, the novel had a sprawling cast of characters — a pimp-scarred prostitute, an African-American journalist, a “cosmic philosopher” named Farley the Sailor — that included a disillusioned musician who takes a job at a jingoistic radio station called WUSA. . . .
He drank oceanically. He liked to spend time with the actor Nick Nolte, who starred in a misbegotten film version of Stone’s 1974 novel “Dog Soldiers,” because Nolte’s idea of a good time in Mexico, Stone once said, “was to drink a bottle of tequila and lie down in the middle of the main street and see what happened.” It was the cigarettes, though — Stone had a three-pack-a-day habit — that ultimately did him in. . . .
In his best novels — “A Hall of Mirrors,” “Dog Soldiers,” “A Flag for Sunrise,” “Children of Light,” “Outerbridge Reach” — Stone drew from a deeper well than most of his contemporaries. He transmuted basic matter into something larger.
He had a foreboding feel for the things that slid beneath the surface of life. He could pin a milieu to the wall. In “Children of Light,” his Hollywood novel, he wrote: “There are people at this table who could vulgarize pure light.”
Stone was a strange pilgrim, a lonely sentinel. He said about his first novel what you could say about all his fiction: “I had taken America as my subject, and all my quarrels with America went into it.”
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