Child of Light

November 15, 2019
Comprehensive life of the late novelist Robert Stone (1937-2015), victim and chronicler of an excessive era. "Nothing is free." So, writes novelist Bell (Behind the Moon, 2017, etc.), ran a mantra of Stone's. It's fitting. Stone grew up fatherless, with a mother who may have been schizophrenic, in and out of orphanages and shelters, and he responded with a need to fight for every achievement. So he did, joining a gang, showing up drunk to high school--and somehow arriving in Wallace Stegner's famed writing workshop at Stanford. There, Stone fell in with the likes of Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and spent much of the 1960s zonked out, lending irony to the subtitle of his memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. But as Bell clearly shows, Stone was still capable of marvels: His Vietnam War novel Dog Soldiers, published in 1974, was "regarded as the definitive work of fiction on the war by readers who found it both curious and curiously appropriate that only a small percentage of its action took place in Vietnam, and practically none of it in combat." Other hallmark novels were Children of Light and A Flag for Sunrise, a Pulitzer finalist. Stone arrived at a state of solvency and relative fame in midcareer, hampered only by his prodigious appetites: The end of the 1990s found him suffering from many illnesses, some self-wrought, as his "drug and alcohol problems were still hovering at crisis level." Bell's approach seems formulaic after a time: He writes of a period of time, offers a sometimes-too-detailed summary of the plot of a given book or story, surveys the criticism (Michiko Kakutani being a special bête noire), and finally looks at the till. It's a lot of inside baseball. Though perhaps too much for civilian readers, the business end in particular will fascinate working writers. For all Stone's flaws, Bell makes a solid case for the importance of his work. Perhaps not the last word on Stone but essential for students and fans of the writer's works.

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December 23, 2019
Biographer and novelist Bell (Freedom’s Gate) meticulously recounts the life of Robert Stone (1937–2015), whose novels “chronicled the peak and the decline of a great many aspects of U.S. world dominance” through troubled, sometimes autobiographical characters. Raised in New York City, Stone spent much of his childhood in a school run by the Marist Brothers religious order while his schizophrenic mother—Stone never knew his father—was institutionalized. Though he lost his faith, this exposure to Catholicism shaped both his worldview and work. A Navy stint initiated a lifelong penchant for travel to often-fraught locales, including Saigon and Jerusalem, which informed his books. His first novel, 1967’s A Hall of Mirrors, a dark portrait of demagoguery in New Orleans, was an instant success. His second, 1974’s Dog Soldiers, about heroin smuggling during the Vietnam War, won the National Book Award. A friend of Stone and his wife, Janice, Bell draws extensively on conversations with both, but doesn’t allow that closeness to compromise his accounts of Stone’s personal struggles, including with drug addiction. However, an unnecessary level of detail (Bell even gives the names of the dying Stone’s physical therapists) distracts from the book’s focus on cementing Stone’s reputation. Nonetheless, Bell provides a solid biography of an important American novelist.

February 1, 2020

This first full biography of American novelist Robert Stone (1937-2015), by the Stone's friend and colleague Bell (Goucher Coll.), examines each of author's seven novels, starting with Hall of Mirrors, which was adapted into the film WUSA. Bell provides meticulous details of his subject's creative process, cogently describing Stone's marriage to wife Janice, as well as the family, friends, and literary acquaintances who dominated his sphere. For readers who lived through the 1960s (including this reviewer), Stone's depictions of the drug counterculture, the Vietnam War, Hollywood, unrest in Central America, the Middle East, and Israel bring to vivid life the many tumultuous events and themes that dominated American culture during the second half of the 20th-century. Stone himself wrestled with drug and alcohol addiction and a wanderlust lifestyle inspired by Beats such as Ken Kesey and his followers, all of which made this generation both exhilarating and exhausting. VERDICT For anyone who appreciates great literature (especially the wonderful fiction of Stone), this is required reading.--Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn

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Starred review from March 15, 2020
Robert Stone (1937-2015) remains one of America's finest novelists, and his friend and fellow fiction writer Madison Smartt Bell pays moving tribute to Stone's genius and to the man behind the books in this eloquent and insightful biography. Stone's life, we learn, was anything but conventional, beginning with a troubled childhood in which his mercurial mother's bouts of schizophrenia forced the young Stone into a Catholic home for orphans in New York. Later, Stone wandered the globe as an itinerant teacher and writer, suffering all the while from addictions to alcohol and opiates, though he was heroically nursed by his wife of more than 50 years, Janice, whom Bell credits as being everything from caregiver to copy editor to business manager. Stone was not a prolific fiction writer (eight novels and two short-story collections), but his books, as Bell elucidates, always found the zeitgeist of an era (civil rights in A Hall of Mirrors, Vietnam in Dog Soldiers, millennium fever in Damascus Gate). Bell also excels at exploring the religious elements in Stone's life and work, which appear like themes from a fugue, juggling between "muscular atheism" and a sense of the "numinous" (inspired first by psychedelics ingested with his good friend Ken Kesey). Stone often described his characters as searching for "the life more abundant"; Stone was forever on that torturous trail, too, and Bell brilliantly maps every step along the way.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)