[In the following essay, Finn provides an overview of Stone's novels and examines the strengths and weaknesses of his writing style, social and political concerns, and underlying religious sentiment.]

Robert Stone is a highly ambitious author whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. (But what's a writer's heaven for?) He is an imposingly confident writer whose self-assessments, nevertheless, sometimes seem off the mark. However, on the basis of his most recent novel it is clear that he is still on a rising trajectory whose end is not yet in sight. Altogether, a most interesting case.

Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), gave notice that here was a new and original voice, marked by a distinctive sensibility. (The William Faulkner Foundation award for the best first novel of the year was the precursor of the many awards Stone's novels have received.) Between then and 1992, four other novels followed, each separated from its predecessor by a number of years and each adding, if unevenly, to Stone's stature and reputation. With this handful of novels Stone has succeeded in projecting very powerfully a vision of America, delineating his view of Americans, their present condition, and their cultural landscape. He belongs, it is clear, in the demanding tradition of those American writers who have attempted to define the contours and tap the pulse of this singular country.

The relation between the life and work of highly imaginative writers can vary remarkably. In some cases the relationship is sufficiently obscure to lend itself to highly speculative interpretation. In others, the relationship seems so clear as to be almost self-evident. Insofar as these represent polar positions, Stone is definitely closer to the second. Because Stone has been generous in disclosing major aspects of his life in interviews, articles, and talks, we can know some of what he himself thinks has helped shape his views and inform his imagination.

Stone's early years make the childhood endured by Charles Dickens appear almost normal. Born in Brooklyn in 1937, Stone was reared mostly in Manhattan by a schizophrenic mother whose husband effectively disappeared when Robert was an infant. Because she was in and out of hospitals, between the ages six and ten he was placed in an orphanage operated by the Marist brothers. After that he and his mother lived together in rooming houses and SROs (single room occupancy hotels) on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Occasionally they would travel to some place (New Mexico, Chicago) with the hope that things would be better, but invariably they landed back in New York. On one return trip, their funds were so low they slept out on a roof. Stone recalls this as a strange but not unhappy period of his life, certainly not one of deprivation. But since his mother, who served as his reference point to reality, often looked at things from an odd angle, he had a lot of sorting out to do.

The high school that Stone attended was also run by the Marists, who attempted to impart a strongly dogmatic view of Catholicism. After they and Stone developed a mutual dislike, Stone cut out, with the feeling, later revised, that he was, at sixteen, saying goodbye to religion and all that.

Although he attended New York University for about a year, he is essentially an autodidact with wide-ranging interests and, apparently, a capacious memory. A writing scholarship took him to California in the early 1960s, where he soon clued in with Ken Kesey, becoming one of the Merry Pranksters and an active participant in the new and heavy drug scene based on LSD and other “mind-expanding” drugs.

Stone traveled to Antarctica in 1958 and subsequent trips took him to Vietnam as a correspondent—another drug-filled scene—and to Central America. He has also spent time in academia as a writer-in-residence (“a kind of dropout's revenge”) and in Hollywood, where two of his books (A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers) were turned into major but unsatisfactory movies.

Many of these and other life experiences have found their way, transmuted, into Stone's fiction. A Hall of Mirrors, for example, draws heavily upon the days when he sold encyclopedias in small towns across Louisiana and worked as a census taker in the black slums of New Orleans. It is a large sprawling colorful narrative, packed with close observation and multiple incident. The people we encounter are mainly the loners, the drifters, the god-forsaken, strung-out losers who, during their bleak days on this earth, walk unsteadily along the edge of the abyss. Stone skillfully orchestrates their ups and downs, their meetings and mergings and partings even as he propels them to the phantasmagoric, apocalyptic scene that brings the story to its near conclusion. More remarkable than the structure of the book is Stone's language, already an admirably supple instrument that can pass readily from the low colloquial to elevated rhetoric, and that easily folds into the narrative quotations from or references to sources as diverse as Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Dante and Yeats, Cromwell and La Boheme. Equally striking is Stone's ear, his dialogue ringing with complete conviction.

The narrative carries the reader from a low-keyed opening to its highly charged, fever-pitched ending, the tenor of which may be suggested by an extended quotation. Here is a leading character, speaking to the large crowd gathered for a great patriotic revival meeting.

“The American way is innocence,” Reinhardt announced. … “Americans,” he resumed, “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. This lady is a whip to niggers! This lady is chinkbane. Conjure with this lady and mestizos, zambos, Croats, and all such persons simply disappear. Confronted with her, Australian abos turn to the wall and die. Latins choke on their arrogant smirks. Nips disembowel themselves, the teeming brains of gypsies turn to gum. This lady is Columbia my friends. Every time she tells her little daughter that Jesus drank carbonated grape juice—then, somewhere in the world a Jew raises quivering gray fingers to his weasely throat and falls dead.

“Patriots, there is danger. Listen to the nature of the menace. They're trying to take that fat old woman off her Greyhound Bus. … The lady's bus is approaching. The fiend stirs! O horrible! O, America—horrible.”

Before the novel ends, it has skewered—O horrible, Americans—northern liberals in the South, advertising, radio evangelists, corrupt politicians, strident anticommunism, ignorant patriotism, racism, conspiracy kooks, militarism, and the American dream. A powerful vision but not a pretty one. Stone devoted five years to the writing of his first novel and says he put into it “everything I had experienced, felt, or suspected.” This is easy to believe. As impressive as the book is, it incorporates simply too much, the incremental value of successive scenes and incidents often decreasing in effect as they mount in number.

Dog Soldiers (1974), Stone's second novel, equally large in ambition, is more controlled in execution. Its overall story line is cleaner, less cluttered. As a consequence, Stone's esthetic intent is more nearly congruent with his moral vision. With this book, his particular vision, which will also inform his later books, becomes clearer. In the opening paragraphs of A Hall of Mirrors we were briefly introduced to a young, naive, Midwestern Bible salesman, dressed in “a dark ministerial suit and an old man's gray fedora,” whose company has transported him to alien Southern states after filling his head with thoughts of good territories, commissions, high profits, and a memorized sales pitch. This note of religion tied to misplaced hope, false entrepreneurship, and cynicism recurs throughout the book.

The first few pages of Dog Soldiers introduces the reader to Converse, a “journalist of sorts,” in Saigon who falls into conversation with a middle-aged American lady. He learns that she has spent fourteen years in Nguc Linh Province (“We call it God's country. It's sort of a joke.”) as a missionary. Their talk is of religion, and her parting comment is an admonitory assertion: “Satan is very powerful here.” “Yes,” Converse responds. “He would be.” From there Converse goes to a drug scene. In uncertainty, unease, and distrust, and with a lack of experience, he makes a deal to help smuggle a cache of heroin into the States. The trail of the heroin leads to a mixed bag of people who are eager to get their hands on it and who show convincingly that they are prepared to do whatever is necessary to get their way. At a former love-and-peace compound set in high, forested mountains there is a final showdown, a drawn-out, violent, bloody confrontation, reminiscent to Converse of the war in Vietnam.

There are some obvious similarities with A Hall of Mirrors: indulgence in heavy drugs, a confusion of reality and hallucinations, almost derelict characters, fast-paced action, and a violent resolution. But the Vietnam War that was background in the first novel is here brought forward. This work might well have been subtitled “Bringing Vietnam Home.” Violence and drugs in Vietnam are directly related to drugs and violence in the States. Integral to the novel is the problem posed to Converse and others by the U.S. presence in Vietnam. “We didn't know who we were until we got here,” he says. “We thought we were something else.” The story of Converse and those whose lives he touches provides one response to the question of who “we” are.

As a correspondent, Converse deliberately writes about the conflict in a way that will allow his readers to infer moral objections to particular atrocities, even as he grows uncertain about his own response. Yet he muses: “Everyone must [feel these things] or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline” The value of human life, tested in Vietnam, is tested again in the States. “You can figure,” Converse is told, “your troubles started over in Nam.”

Stone's characters, their lives frequently reduced to a desperate and elemental level, are driven to cope with basic questions of existence. These existential questions are, in Dog Soldiers, frequently placed in a religious context, where the concepts of good and evil are meaningful and where their possible incarnation in particular people is believable. But the answers remain ever elusive. Much of the undeniable strength of the novel lies in the skill with which Stone blends low life and high matters, and draws the reader into the deeply imagined space they occupy.

With these two novels Stone stamped his signature on his chosen narrative form and established what are now its recognizable characteristics. They are evident in A Flag for Sunrise (1981), which equals if it does not surpass its predecessor. It is set primarily in the Central American country of Tecan where a revolution is brewing. A large number of people with quite different backgrounds and interest are to be caught up in the threatening conflict: the missionaries, Father Egan, whose faith is moribund, and Sister Justin Feeney, who is nervously troubled but sympathetic to the revolution; the vile lieutenant Campos; the American anthropologist Frank Holliwell, a former CIA agent in Vietnam; the unstable, violent, sleazy addict Pablo Tabor; the renowned writer Oscar Ocampo, now sexually bent and an informer for the CIA; Xavier Godoy, a Tecanecan priest with revolutionary leanings; the Callahans, a restless, perverse American couple who smuggle dope; Tom Zecca of the U.S. Embassy in Tecan and his wife Marie; a mysterious Mr. Heath; Naftali, a rich suicidal Indian; and a number of subsidiary others.

Stone introduces these characters on different lines of action, one whole set making their entrance one quarter of the way into the novel. These lines intersect, however, in scenes marked by heavy booze and drugs, suicide, murder, conspiracy, treachery, torture, varied child mutilations, self-questioning, self-deception, and self-discernment. After this list, it may seem incongruous to add that there are also scenes of considerable comic effect. (The scene in which a drunken Holliwell delivers his scheduled Tecan speech to a gradually hostile audience is oddly reminiscent of the antic scene in Greene's The Third Man in which—because of a mix-up—an American writer of Westerns is pressed to give a lecture in Vienna to an audience that believes him to be a highly regarded contemporary writer.)

The Vietnam debacle is invoked as an augury of the role of the U.S. in the affairs of Central America and, particularly, the potential revolution in Tecan. A number of different views are noted and probed:

Oscar Ocampo: “We're all whores here. Because of you. I mean,” he explained, “because of the U.S.”

Marie Zecca: “It's not all one thing or the other, you know. … It's not us being the bad guys all the time. Only assholes think like that. Pious assholes.”

Holliwell: “Do you expect to conduct your career in one American-sponsored shithole after another, partying with their ruling class, advising their conscripts in counterinsurgency and overseeing their armaments, and not compromising your honor? Because that sounds very tricky to me.”

Sister Justin: “Everyone, every mother and child on the coast was in his [Campos's] hands, living and dying through his sufferance. The torture and murder of children was something more important than even the establishment of revolution, surely. But was it not all of a piece—Campos on the coast, the president in his mortar-proof palace in the capital, the American interests that kept everything in place?”

It is in this climate of uncertainty about and distrust of U.S. policies in Central America that the characters work out their destinies. For the novel is not an abstract political tract, but an incisive rendering of different kinds of people who are drawn into the vortex of the gathering political storm. Further, they—and the reader—are led to contemplate their fate in a context larger than the revolution. Faith, belief, and commitment are terms that apply to the revolution, but also to a realm that transcends quotidian life and politics. Again, a few quotations will indicate how different characters express such awareness, even if inchoately:

Father Egan and Sister Justin: “Interesting my orthodoxy should make any difference to you. Surely you don't believe?”

“I can't answer your question.”

“Well,” Egan said, “you're supposed to answer it every day.”

The inarticulate Pablo and a bartender: “What is the use of me?”

“Da use of you, mon? Same as everbody. Put one foot to front of de other. Match de dolluh wif de day.”

“That's all? … Don't you think everybody got some special purpose?”

Holliwell: “It would be strange to see such Catholics,” he thought. “It would be strange to see people who believed in things, and acted in the world according to what they believed. It would be different. Like old times.”

Campos and Egan: “I am not an animal,” Campos said. “I believe there is a spiritual force. I believe in life after death.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

In context these exchanges resonate, they reflect back and forth on each other. So too, do reflections that touch the inner life, the core of the person. Pablo broods about Deedee Callahan: “What he wanted, he realized, was to fuck and to kill her. The realization made him even gloomier because he believed that such impulses were particular to him alone. It touched his self-regard.” And Holliwell, an honorable man, admires and is attracted to various aspects of Sister Justin: “… she was a challenge and a provocation to the likes of Holliwell. The impulse stripped down was to love her or destroy her. Stripped further it was towards both these ends, to subsume her in flesh and spirit. It was predatory.” These impulses both unite and separate Pablo and Holliwell, and the reader is left to parse these yearnings and to reflect on how they work themselves out in the ensuing action.

Taken together, these observations on the personal, the inner life, place in perspective the revolution, U.S. policy in Tecan, and those who are drawn into the clash between the two.

Stone is a risk-taker and it is in the nature of risk that one does not always succeed. With Children of Light (1986), Stone did not succeed, at least not completely. Based on his experience in Hollywood, his send-up of Tinseltown has strong scenes, comic scenes, near-tragic scenes, but they will fail to engage many readers. His previous novels open on a relatively quiet note and entice the reader into the disquieting world that is then disclosed. Children of Light immediately thrusts the reader into an uncongenial, druggy atmosphere, and the less he responds to it the less likely he is to become concerned about those who are at home in it, most particularly the addicted screenwriter and the schizophrenic actress around whom most of the plot revolves.

With Outerbridge Reach (1992), Stone made a departure of sorts. Owen Browne, a veteran of Vietnam combat and a devoted husband and father, is a relatively square citizen. We soon learn, however, that he is stirred by some “obscure guilt” and disturbed by private discomforts. An odd series of incidents present him with the challenge to sail, single-handed, in a round-the-world race. In spite of forebodings which he shares with his wife, Anne, he accepts the challenge. Enter Ron Strickland, cynical and corrupt, to whom, in a separate line of action, we have been introduced as he is completing a documentary film in Central America. Hired to make a documentary based on the round-the-world race, he enlists the help of Anne, whom he gradually seduces. In alternating scenes, we follow the fortunes of Browne on the water and of Strickland and Anne back home. As he realizes he cannot win, Browne is subjected to extreme pressures, physical, mental, and spiritual. He gradually realizes that his boat, for which he had written cheerleader advertising copy, is a piece of decomposing plastic. His only distractions from his increasingly desperate plight are his thoughts and a missionary radio station that dramatizes stories from the Bible. He is tempted to claim the race and the prize by deception.

“Another man might have done it—have taken the prize and spent the rest of his life in secret laughter. God, he thought, it's truth I love and always have. … What a misunderstanding it had all been. He could no more take a prize by subterfuge than he could sail to the white port of his dreams.

“So it had been in the war. Things had turned out strangely. The order of battle, the hamlet evaluation reports, the Rules of Engagement, were dreams. Truth had been a barely visible shimmer. …”

Anne's trials are, in their own way, almost as severe as she is forced to reevaluate her past, her present betrayal, and an uncertain future. The final scenes of the book, both on land and sea, are harrowing as Anne and Browne recognize and greet the fate they have helped prepare for themselves.

Stone has said that he writes good prose, and that he does. His language is a gift and an attainment, the glory and strength of his novels. It charges the story, propelling the reader into the most violent action even as it invites reflection on that action. It can draw on sensual imagery and evoke the most delicate or the most sinister atmosphere. (It is all the more disappointing to encounter the few faults that mar some passages. For example, Stone regularly confuses an adverbial form with the predicate adjective in such phrases as “the flowers smelled beautifully,” “the sex had been poorly,” and “he felt differently.” He misuses “fulsome” as it is frequently misused instead of using it correctly to mean excessively offensive. In context, “fulsome clouds” makes little sense. He is capable of describing a restaurant as being “mellifluent with Vivaldi,” which will not do, and of writing in a crucial passage that “Everything seemed obviated in its plainsong,” which is questionable at best.)

War and references to war are, it seems, an inevitable part of Stone's stories. He has seen and felt and imagined what war can do, and has reflected on what part it plays in the American experience. But the views he has expressed about this country, particularly in its foreign ventures, seem time-bound by the Vietnam experience and recent Central American conflicts. They seem highly familiar, even conventional. He says that he does not believe that the course the U.S. has trod is simply some horror story of racism and murder. Nevertheless, in a reference to Central America he can assert, “we have incurred a blood debt, and it is coming up for payment.” Accepting his premise for the nonce, it would be interesting to learn who or what country he thinks is going to attempt to collect on that debt. We live in a world, after all, in which even Vietnam is trying to entice U.S. interests to return. Of Ronald Reagan, Stone has said that only his charm is authentic. “Otherwise he's always been the agent of someone else's agenda.” This assertion is demonstrably false.

A legacy of the '60s in which he was shaping his political outlook, Stone's thoughts on the role of America abroad are notable neither for originality nor acuity, but only for his imaginative possession of them. His critical views of U.S. foreign policies are not outrageous or simple-minded as are those of Oliver Stone nor wooden and predictable as were those of Graham Greene, but they remain, in spite of his vigorous appropriation of them, a weak pillar in the architectonics of his work.

V. S. Pritchett has said of Stone that “he should stifle his tendency toward godly musings and carryings on and let his comic urge go where it will.” Pritchett is a wise and penetrating critic, but with the first part of his advice he has, I think, gone off the rails. One could have given the same advice to Dostoevsky, I believe, with as much effect. Stone has given a good deal of public testimony that he takes very seriously the question of God's presence—or absence—in the world. He frequently refers to the influence of his early Catholic schooling, has said that it's hard to ignore religion “when you mess with acid,” and he knows these concerns distinguish him from most other American novelists today. “There are no writers I'm aware of who are doing the same sort of thing I'm doing because I take seriously questions that the culture has largely obviated. In a sense, I'm a theologian. And so far as I know the only one.” The skepticism “that led me out of religious belief also leads me out of secular complacency.”

These concerns do not make him unique among American writers—as he seems to think—but they do place him in a small and special group. His most deeply moving scenes occur when, against a sense of the possibly transcendent, his characters act in such a way that it raises questions about their inner identity, their true self. (“What is the use of me?”) This has nothing to do with the “enrich your inner life, make money, and discover God” pitch, and everything to do with locating the self in the universe. It is a universe in which God may be absent but evil is almost palpable. “Satan is very powerful here.” Like François Mauriac, Stone could say of himself, “I am a metaphysician of the concrete.”

A moral vision as intense as Stone's can be communicated artistically only if it is fused with techniques equal to it. At his best, Stone achieves that fusion, technique and vision, style and substance, becoming one. He remains one of the few American novelists whose next work a serious reader can anticipate with high and confident expectations.