[In the following essay, Packer provides an overview of Stone's novels, thematic concerns, and character types, noting that although Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach are weaker than his first three novels, Stone's visionary critique of American society remains underappreciated by a majority of critics.]

For a quarter century Robert Stone has been the American Baudelaire—poète maudit of Catholic mysticism and controlled substances, critic of modern folly, romantic pessimist in love with apocalypse. His five novels are all alike in structure and atmosphere, carrying two or three characters through a tense, incremental convergence toward catastrophe; taken together, they diagnose sick America in the rush and crash and flashback of Vietnam, which reverberates through all his work. And like Dos Passos and Faulkner and Bellow and Mailer, Stone writes novels that demand to be taken together. They don't simply create distinct imaginary worlds—though they do this with the kind of indelible power that can be dangerous for young novelists; they also attempt a sustained commentary on American life. Stone begins at the time when Bellow went sour, in the sixties, and everything he's written carries the marks of that traumatic birth: not skeptical humanism but lofty fatalism, closer perhaps to Melville, among American novelists, than to any of Stone's contemporaries.

Such a writer is rare enough these days, since ideas are now taken to be examples of bad writing, and an important subject is a sign of bad taste. A good deal of the praise Stone has received throughout his career carries a sort of unquestioning gratitude: at last, here's one in the grand tradition—an ambitious novelist, and readable too. What Stone actually says about American life often gets overlooked; enough that he says anything at all.

From time to time one of his characters tries to articulate a vision, too obliquely or too explicitly, in vernacular or highbrow terms, with which Stone is equally at ease. Here is Rheinhardt, the nihilistic hero of A Hall of Mirrors (1966), high on pot and whipping a New Orleans stadium full of right-wing fanatics into a frenzy:

Americans, our shoulders are broad and sweaty but our breath is sweet. When your American soldier fighting today drops a napalm bomb on a cluster of gibbering chinks, it's a bomb with a heart. In the heart of that bomb, mysteriously but truly present, is a fat old lady on her way to see the world's fair. This lady is as innocent as she is fat and motherly. This lady is our nation's strength. This lady's innocence if fully unleashed could defoliate every forest in the torrid zone.

Here are Converse and Hicks, the ex-Marines of Dog Soldiers (1974), planning to smuggle heroin home from Vietnam:

“You'd better be careful,” Hicks told him. “It's gone funny in the states.”

“It can't be funnier than here.”

“Here everything's simple,” Hicks said. “It's funnier there.”

Or Holliwell, the liberal anthropologist in A Flag for Sunrise (1981), delivering a drunken lecture on the two American cultures to a scandalized audience in Central America:

We have quite another culture concealed behind the wooden nutmeg and the flash that we're selling. It's a secret culture. … Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing—or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen. … Underneath it all, our secret culture, the non-exportable one, is dying. It's going sour and we're going to die of it. We'll die of it quietly around our own hearths while our children laugh at us. So, no more Mickey Mouse, amigos. …

Or Gordon Walker, the burned-out screenwriter in Children of Light (1986), embarrassed in the act of doing cocaine by a Mexican painter:

“A case could certainly be made,” Walker said, “that it's bad for the Indians. In terms of exploitation.”

Maldonado waved the argument away.

“It's neither good nor bad for the Indians. It makes no difference for them. It's ourselves and our societies that we're destroying.”

“That's as it should be,” Walker said.

Or Owen Browne, the Vietnam veteran in Stone's most recent novel, Outerbridge Reach (1992), lying awake with night thoughts after watching a public-television film on Cuba:

The documentary had been no different from a hundred other programs that had offended Browne with their liberal humility and left-wing bias. But the vision of its imagined country, a homeland that could function as both community and cause, was one that remained with him. Browne felt his own country had failed him in that regard. It was agreeable to think such a place might exist, even as home to the enemy. But no such place existed.

The war would never be fought because the enemy had proved false. All his fierce alternatives were lies. Surely, Browne thought sleepily, this was a good thing. Yet something was lost. For his own part, he was tired of living for himself and those who were him by extension. It was impossible, he thought. Empty and impossible. He wanted more.

Or Stone himself, writing recently in the New York Times:

Having hung on and outlasted every conceivable variety of ancient villainy and foreign “ism” what use can we make of our victory? Over the long process of defining America we seem to have reached a point at which our nation signifies the virtual apotheosis of the interested self.

It's worth trying to work out the common vision that produced these various statements, because Stone's strengths as a writer have always been bound up with his subject matter, and so have his flaws. Of his five novels, the two most recent are noticeably weaker and thinner. A hundred factors may account for this, but perhaps the most revealing is the change in Stone's subject itself, which he once called America and Americans.

Stone's work offers several kinds of thrill: complicated cinematic plots packed with tense excitement, frightening images of various hells, and the intellectual reach provided by characters who can articulate the meaning of their own destruction. Sophistication and low life together, terror and irony, Shakespeare and skag, create the distinct moral atmosphere of his work. You know you're in a Robert Stone novel when the captain of a motor yacht running contraband guns quotes Hamlet on Divine Providence as he reaches for another Flor de Cana. Stone achieves much of his irony by contrasting a somewhat formal expository style with the terse vernacular of the dialogue or that formal style with the grim absurdity of the content it conveys, as in this moment between the two heroin smugglers of Dog Soldiers:

[Converse] reached over, picked up the Portable Nietzsche which Hicks had set on the chair beside his, and inspected the front and back covers. There was something slightly contemptuous about the way he looked at it.

“You still into this?”

“Sure,” Hicks said.

Converse laughed. He looked wasted and flushed; there was pain in his eyes compounded of booze, fever, and fear.

“Jesus,” he said. “That's really fucking piquant.”

“I don't know what that means,” Hicks said.

“Inspected,” “slightly contemptuous,” “compounded of,” “piquant”—they raise the tone a little higher than fits the scene, so that at the flatness of “wasted,” “booze,” and the dialogue, it has all the farther to fall. In Dog Soldiers Stone's ironic mode almost never lets up, but in all the novels there is at least one character who either shares Stone's fascination with human sordidness and folly or is himself so “funny,” “wigged out,” so much “the thing itself” (favorite phrases of Stone's), that his every profanity affords his creator this sort of distance.

Stone's central characters fall loosely into two types—ironists and seekers. The former seem closest to the writer's own consciousness and provide moral commentary on their situation and the larger world; the latter are generally either psychopaths or women (or, as in the case of the mad film actress of Children of Light, both). The former survive ignobly; the latter violently perish. “He was the celebrated living dog,” Stone writes of John Converse, “preferred over dead lions.” Like all of Stone's ironists, Converse—“a funny little fucker”—makes one “half-assed” and fateful attempt to overcome his bone-deep fear of life and stake a grander vision. In his case, it's his decision to smuggle three kilograms of heroin into California. Converse's attempt ends badly, bringing terror into his life and death to Hicks, the novel's Zen-deluded seeker. The ironists fail not just out of poor judgment and incompetence but because they don't believe fervently enough and are paralyzed before greatness by their awareness of the ultimate futility of “things”—an overused word that stands for reality, raw mindless matter, and, at times, a sinister metaphysical force that inhabits it and sabotages every human scheme.

As for the seekers, they want “More,” “Life more abundant.” “In her eyes, the hunger for absolutes,” thinks Holliwell, the anthropologist, of Sister Justin Feeney, the nun who struggles with faith in God and revolution in A Flag for Sunrise, Stone's finest work. “A woman incapable of compromise who had taken on compromise like a hair shirt and never forgiven herself or anyone else, and then rebelled. She could, he thought, have no idea what that look would evoke in the hearts of smaller weaker people, clinging to places of power. She was Enemy, Nemesis, Cassandra. She was in real trouble.” Justin, being a seeker, a woman, and guileless, is doomed. And her real trouble is Holliwell himself. Like Converse, Holliwell makes a gesture toward the life of action and meaning: he goes, at the request of a CIA friend, to Sister Justin's mission in Tecan, a Central American country about to blow. His plan is to spy not for the government but for himself, “to see people who believed in things, and acted in the world according to what they believed.” But it's an ambiguous gesture at best, and when he falls in love with Justin's spirit the ambiguity lands her in the hands of torturers. Holliwell survives, like Stone's other living dogs, with regret, the characteristic emotion, along with fear, of the ironist.

The seekers' end always arrives in an apocalypse, with an ecstatic glimpse of meaning that's like a reproach to the ironists' fallen world of “things.” Sister Justin's death, rendered with the deepest pathos, comes as Tecan's revolution explodes all around, and her last words to her torturer are sublime: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” In the same novel Pablo, the speed-freak Coast Guard deserter, has a demented revelation just before his violent death: “There's a process and I'm in the middle of it. A lot of stuff I do is meant to be.” At the end of Dog Soldiers Hicks feels something similar: dying of a bullet wound sustained in a phantasmagoric shootout, carrying his heroin across the desert flats, he imagines himself bearing Vietnam's and the whole world's pain in a triangle at the base of his skull: “‘All you people,’ Hicks shouted, ‘Let it go! Let it go, you hear! I'm out here now. I got it.’ … So there was always a reason, he thought. There had always been a reason. You never know until the moment comes and there it is.” In Children of Light Lee Verger, the schizophrenic film star pushed over the edge by a visit from her old lover Gordon Walker and his cocaine, drowns herself in the ocean after a storm, quoting Cleopatra and murmuring, “It's bliss.” In Outerbridge Reach Browne, beset by hallucinations and defeated by storms and solitude in a single-handed sailboat race around the world, dies by drowning too, though his final moment is painfully free of illusion: “Jumping, stepping into space, he had to wonder if something might not save him. Somehow he had always believed that something would. He had never realized how much he had believed it. Be out there for me, he thought. Stay my fall. Nothing did.”

The apocalypses toward which Stone drives all his plots break the habitual spell of irony. But in the best of his work irony and apocalypse, ironists and seekers, belong to the same vision. It's a vision of universal misguidedness, confusion, fatal innocence, stupidity, cruelty, randomness. All the characters lose their moral bearings, everyone “fucks up,” and none of it can be accounted for, either in history or in theology. It's simply Stone's instinct, the sort of profound bias at the heart of any important writer's worldview, that “things” are this way. Stone sums it up in the three words everyone who's been in Vietnam keeps repeating through his novels: “There it is”—a cosmic shrug, but much darker and scarier than Kurt Vonnegut's “So it goes.” “Oh, man,” says a character in Dog Soldiers. “Who knows why they do the shit they do?”, and Hicks answers, “The desires of the heart are as crooked as a corkscrew.” “Damn it,” Holliwell says when spooks and local cops demand his reason for being in Tecan, “I don't know quite why I came. … You may live in a world of absolute calculation but I don't.” Holliwell's scorn for the world's “positive thinkers” who “convince themselves that in this whirling tidal pool of existence providence was sending them a message” seems not at all different from Stone's. Instead of providence there is “whirl,” “delusion,” “primary process”; at best “spasms, flashes,” “glintings,” “a slender notion”—“One is only out here in this, whatever it is.” Cosmic pessimism clothed in a strange and harsh vernacular: no wonder Stone sprinkles King Lear on all his novels and drenches Children of Light with it.

Of course, this is partly the worldview of a Catholic experiencing—as all of Stone's Catholics do—a crisis of faith. As Holliwell says, God is no longer “in this place,” and Stone, unlike novelists who have no faith to lose, is left without the possibility of even mundane redemption in political structures or personal relations: take away God and you get whirl. God's absence gives Stone a metaphysical resonance beyond the conventional realism of his style and also sometimes tempts him into the tedious philosophizing of altered mental states, like Father Egan's drunken mysticism that keeps breaking the rhythm of A Flag for Sunrise's last hundred pages. Stone's weakness for his characters' ability to ingest huge quantities of drink and drugs and to turn the portentous, debonair phrase on the brink of disaster somewhat resembles Graham Greene's infatuation with holy sinners and glamorous doom.

The difference is that Stone doesn't despise innocence as Greene does: American innocence isn't Stone's whipping boy, it's his constant subject—an innocence gone “funny” in the sixties funhouse. He raises this theme in his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, when the alcoholic musician Rheinhardt declares at the climactic Patriotic Revival: “American innocence shall rise in mighty clouds of vapor to the scent of heaven and confound the nations!” As the drug-driven speech goes on, the vapor of innocence thickens into napalm and bigotry: our faith in ourselves as messengers of providence will destroy the world. But it would be a mistake to equate this with the facile black humor of Stone's sixties contemporaries. Stone's irony is merciless with the consequences of American innocence—in the South, in California, in Central America, above all, in Vietnam—yet unlike the novelists Bellow called the “wastelanders,” he is fundamentally earnest and capable of tragedy and pathos. Nothing moves him quite as much as the reach, hope, and folly that only innocence on the grand scale could produce. “We believed we knew more about great unpeopled spaces than any other European nation,” Holliwell intones during his drunken lecture. “We believed that no one wished and willed as hard as we, and that no one was so able to make wishes true. We believed we were more. More was our secret watchword.”

America is sick, but its sickness grows out of its greatness. Stone's nuns, drunks, soldiers, and intellectuals never fail to ruin themselves and those around them, but they do it on an impressive scale, with heart. They are true to the dreams of their youth, even though sooner or later the dreams turn into nightmare. Stone strips his people bare, but he does it with love.

This isn't just the vision of a Catholic more attracted to the fall than grace. It carries the odor of a particular period. I was only ten or eleven in the San Francisco Bay area of Dog Soldiers, yet the novel's most trivial details, the “leatherette black coats and pastel slouch hats” of drinkers in a dive bar, the hollow bits of hippie conversation, perfectly convey the mood of the moment when the sixties were ending and colorful San Francisco bled into seedy Oakland.

It was a period well suited to Stone's vision, for irony and apocalypse, grandeur and fuck-ups often seemed indistinguishable. Drugs provide an apt vehicle for this vision because they always lead to either absurdity or exaltation and sometimes to both: his drug scenes give Stone his bitterest pieces of social criticism and his most poetic evocations of the urge to find a level higher than “things.” One drug or another characterizes all his novels save the most recent, and the choice of drug mirrors the shifts in Stone's themes: marijuana suits the relatively innocent fantasies of the hipsters and hippies in A Hall of Mirrors; heroin suits the hallucinatory dangers that Dog Soldiers traffics from Vietnam to California; speed suits the angry betrayal and dispiritedness of the soldiers of fortune in A Flag for Sunrise.

The drug that controls Children of Light is cocaine. It is, of course, a fitting drug for a novel about movie people in the eighties. In an essay on cocaine Stone called it a “success” drug, bound up with selfishness, greed, and narcissism. It leaves little room for any goal higher than the “interested self.” It's impossible to imagine one of the coke-addled beautiful people in Children of Light experiencing the cosmic altruism of Hicks's trip across the desert flats at the end of Dog Soldiers. And this change in drug signals a shift in Stone's vision of the American sickness. His fourth and fifth novels—Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach—are populated less with seekers and ironists than with corrupt, venal, narrow-spirited salesmen, publicists, agents, entertainment dealers, Hollywood and corporate shills. “Unusual times demand unusual hustles” was Rheinhardt's motto in A Hall of Mirrors, but the hustles now are thoroughly ordinary and vicious. The vision here, curiously old-fashioned, is of a society without honor or heroism. Stone's tone through the better part of these two novels is humorless and severe and censorious. In Outerbridge Reach, Browne, the Vietnam veteran who has settled into a crushingly comfortable life working for a yacht brokerage, deplores the “snotty, weepy, fearful self, the master of most men. The contemporary God”—sounding very like Stone writing in his recent op-ed of “the general erosion of every imaginable standard beyond self-interest.”

In his two most recent novels Stone identifies America's true betrayal: we have lost our reach for “more”; our original “secret culture” is finally dead, and we have settled for mean and petty pursuits. There are no more apocalyptic fuck-ups, only the almighty dollar and the great I Am. The junkie carrying Vietnam's pain and the nun waiting for revolution to release her from herself have been replaced by the agent doing lunch, the documentary filmmaker out to screw his subject in every way.

I think it's unquestionable that these last two novels show a falling-off from Stone's first three. They are thinner in characterization and thought; the tension of their plots ebbs over the course of extremely short chapters that prevent the sort of richness in setting and scene and inner life of Stone's other novels. Their main characters sometimes disappear in a crowd of minor types whose names are hard to keep straight. It's useful to compare three key moments where a decision is made that will determine the fate of a novel's hero. The first is Converse's decision in Dog Soldiers to smuggle heroin, and it comes at the end of a long meditation about “moral objections” and the memory of helicopter gunships shooting North Vietnamese cargo elephants:

[A]s for dope, Converse thought, and addicts—if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.

So there, Converse thought, that's the way it's done. He had confronted a moral objection and overridden it. He could deal with these matters as well as anyone.

But the vague dissatisfaction remained and it was not loneliness or a moral objection; it was, of course, fear. Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am.

Here is Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise:

He knew shortly that he would go to Tecan. There was every reason for it now. He could not face flying home as he was, to the safety of white winter, terrorized, more crippled than when he had come. He had business down there. On the coast near Puerto Alvarado were things to be seen that it was his business to see, his secret business, the business of his dry spirit. He refused to be frightened away.

And here is Browne in Outerbridge Reach:

Browne stayed seated at the table for a while, trying to ponder the results of Hylan's disappearance. All at once the idea came to him of volunteering to enter the race on his own. If he could not sail the boat Hylan was having made in Finland, he might sail the stock model on the floor in front of him. He was sure it was a good boat. He felt a surge of confidence in his own abilities as a sailor. Immediately he began composing, with a pencil on a sheet of lined yellow paper, a letter to Harry Thorne.

The lack of an edge, of emotional intensity or complexity, in the third passage is striking after its counterparts, and in context it's even more pronounced. It signals an attenuation in Stone's subject and language throughout Outerbridge Reach and—a little less so—Children of Light.

Yet, like all of Stone's novels, these finish with rocket bursts: Walker and Lee end up naked, high, and crazy in a pig farm during a Mexican rainstorm, before Lee drowns herself in the Pacific; Browne endures days of hallucination in his sailboat near the South Pole before his suicide in the Atlantic. Neither of these phantasmagoric ends seems driven necessarily by the story that leads to it. Browne in particular, a fairly straight-arrow soldier, husband, father, and salesman, can't bear the thematic and psychic weight Stone ballasts him with once he's at sea. But Stone requires destruction and high drama as much as Hemingway required anticlimax. In his first three novels the apocalypse is of a piece with the observed social world—because they come out of the crucible of the sixties. The last two novels are about a different kind of society. Stone's social criticism has changed with the years, but his essential vision hasn't: it couldn't, because his view of American life has never been based on analysis as much as on the uncalculated conviction of any great talent. Recently this has produced a mix of hallucination and spite that lacks the persuasive unity of the earlier novels. To his credit, Stone hasn't kept writing the same book again and again—he is too sensitive to America's condition. But nasty Hollywood games and suburban suffocation don't engage him like his earlier subjects. Stone's imagination is too visionary for the American nineties.