[In the following review, Edmundson contends that the reductive characters in Outerbridge Reach limit the depth and authenticity of the novel.]

Near the beginning of Children of Light, Robert Stone's fourth novel, which appeared in 1986, Gordon Walker sets out south from Los Angeles along the coastal road heading for Mexico and a disaster that he, through no particular virtue, manages to survive. Walker slows down to stop in a seedy little American town along the way: “At right angles to the coast road, garnished with a rank of rat-infested royal palms, ran the lineup of tackle stores, taco stands, and murky cocktail lounges that was the beach's principal thoroughfare.”

The detail about the rats is pure Robert Stone. In the harsh vision of his first four novels, claims to nobility or high-mindedness (much less to royalty) are inevitably revealed as corrupt or corruptible. Stone's vision, his comprehensive sense of how brutally the world works, is so insistent that it penetrates his novels at every level. Sweet blossoms conceal cancerous defects; religious shrines are sites for human despoilment; a hotel called the Paradise becomes the nerve center for a vile counterrevolution; there are rats in the royal palms.

Stone's central figures are often idealists who succumb, with surprisingly little resistance, to some form of moral blight. His first protagonist, Rheinhardt in A Hall of Mirrors (1968), was a gifted musician: the scene of his Juilliard audition is one of the most beautiful and generous things Stone has written. Rheinhardt ends up as a disk jockey for a rabid right-wing station in New Orleans during the early days of the civil rights movement. The reactionary homiletics, of which he doesn't believe a word, pour out like water. “Where did you learn to do that? he enquired of himself in his new Rheinhardt voice.” Then the reply: “O, but it's nothing really. It's just a routine. I have a lot of routines and that's just one of them.”

Why does Rheinhardt's celestial moment at Juilliard degenerate into the crazy radio routines? One of the novel's implicit answers is that finer passions disintegrate when there is nothing—no religious principles, no cultural or political forms, no varieties of personal connection—to which one can entrust them. Uncorroborated and unsupported, what's best in people turns vile. And the more grace that is given, the lower we sink: witness the degeneration of Rheinhardt's exquisite musical powers into an exquisitely lacerating drunken meanness. Stone's indictment in his first novel is aimed at an America that doesn't provide a home for the renovating energies that it nonetheless succeeds in stimulating.

Hicks, one of the two protagonists of Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974), is a member of the merchant marines who has just finished a hitch in Vietnam. He's also a student of Nietzsche (“what does not kill me makes me stronger”) and a practitioner of Zen and t'ai chi. Finding no outlet for his higher passions, he becomes a heroin smuggler and dies in a lost and unworthy cause. Hicks gets hooked (addiction is rife in the book) to a view of himself as a questing anti-hero, and he dies sustaining it. For Stone, however, it is only an initial nobility that makes such addiction possible. In Hicks's fall, Stone means us to see an image of the degeneration of America as it pitched itself deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War. Unable to be Asia's heroic rescuer, we became, with equal intensity, its despoiler.

Stone's novels have tended to head south. Gordon Walker goes to Mexico, Hicks flees far into Southern California to escape his pursuers, and Frank Holliwell, the main figure in A Flag for Sunrise (1981), makes his way to Central America, where he is duped into revolutionary intrigues that are way beyond his stunted and endemically American powers of understanding. Holliwell is a well-intentioned, irresolute academic with some CIA connections in his background. A sentimental boozer, he's much softer man than Rheinhardt or Hicks. In many ways Holliwell resembles Converse of Dog Soldiers, a character who, in a moment of devastating fear, comes to know himself as a quivering congestion of flesh insulting to the earth, a “funny little fucker.”

But Holliwell, with his gelatinous liberal goodwill, sows more destruction than either Hicks or Rheinhardt. He ends up selling out the woman he believes himself to love, the brilliantly rendered Sister Justin, and giving aid to the reactionary party in the revolution, the party of the Paradise Hotel. Holliwell is, I think, Stone's most impressively achieved character. Though his ineptitude is obvious, one is often forced to admit that it would be very hard in his situation to act differently than he does. Moreover, his narrow fumblings in Central America serve to illuminate America's larger failing there and elsewhere, failings that are owed to the American inclination to believe that whatever is in our own interest must also be virtuous. A Flag for Sunrise is more than a superb adventure novel and a shrewd character study. As an account of America's spiritual blindness in the world at large, the novel may be unsurpassed.

In one sense Stone is an allegorist. All of his novels venture into some heart of darkness, be it Mexico or the New Orleans ghetto. All feature erotic triangles (always two men and a woman). All tell the story of innocence destroyed or destroying. Stone tends, somewhat in the manner of Saul Bellow, to recycle his characters: Gordon Walker recalls Rheinhardt; Holliwell resembles not only Converse but Rainey from A Hall of Mirrors. But the obsessive patternings in Stone's novels don't make the work feel schematic or predictable.

A good deal of Stone's prowess lies in his ability to sustain a tension between his allegorical designs and the moment-to-moment texture of his writing. Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise are written one barbed sentence at a time, often in an arrestingly ironic compound of elegant syntax and American low-life diction. The dialogue is superb. Not only is Stone's inner ear for American speech unerring, but he always proceeds with the playwright's conviction that good dialogue is, if only obliquely, antagonistic. Stone's characters speak because they want to get something done, usually to their interlocutors. As an observer, Stone is also remarkable: he knows just the detail that will work to make you conjure up everything else that's in the room. And this skill contributes to Stone's extraordinary success in pacing; he writes at a velocity perfectly attuned to readers whose powers of response have been accelerated by a lifetime of movie-going. So when Stone is working at his best, he provides a plausible and engaging foreground that refines the allegory. His obsessions haunt his novels subtly, which is an uncommon achievement; they surround everything with a faintly ominous aura.

Outerbridge Reach—the title itself suggests that the writer is attempting to stretch his powers—has the vast ambition that one has come to associate with Stone. He has set out again to write America's biography, this time to show how it is with us in the graceless year of 1992. Stone has embarked on a sea story, a large enough subject for an American writer, who must operate in the wake of Melville and Hemingway. The new novel is full of brilliant writing, and it is populated by arresting, swiftly rendered characters. Stone's knack for evoking a place (especially New York City) is sharper than ever. And the novel has a beautiful classic design, moving adroitly from sea to land. Outerbridge Reach is, among other things, a splendid device, poised and graceful as a gyroscope, and its formal beauty serves as an artful contrast to its characters' inability to find significant form anywhere in life.

At the center of the novel is Owen Browne, an Annapolis graduate, class of 1968, who has served in Vietnam and been one of the country's anointed ones, a trained heir to the last third of the American Century. But the American Century didn't unfold according to plan: humiliated in Vietnam, the nation found itself with little pressing need for men like Browne. In many ways Browne is a character out of Hemingway: brave, clear-minded, intense in his loyalties, with no particular gift for appraising the world, much less himself, ironically. “Irony,” Stone has said in one of the few unironic lines he has allowed into print, “is my friend and brother.” A Stone character who lacks that allegiance is not likely to fare well.

At the opening of the book Browne is in his early 40s and is working as marketing director for Altan Marine, a yacht brokerage in Connecticut. He and his wife, Anne, vote Republican, read The American Spectator, send their daughter to school with the nuns, and nurse a grudge against their generation for not supporting the war in Vietnam. Weary of his work and weary of his home life, Browne is beginning to believe that he has lost the main chance: nothing noble (nothing, that is, that Hemingway might have cared to chronicle) will come of him. Browne is shallow enough not to recognize that he is going through something of a standard midlife crisis, but he is brave enough to translate his unfocused desperation into something more than a down payment on a Porsche or a fling with a 19-year-old.

When Matty Hylan, the owner of Altan's parent company, disappears on the eve of an around-the-world solo boat race, Browne hastily volunteers to take his place. The physical challenge is large: Browne is an experienced, but not an expert, sailor. Stone's main interest, though, is in the voyage of Browne's spirit. Can this man, who embodies some share of what conventional America calls virtue, handle the rigors of isolation on the sea? Is there a possibility for heroism in America's middle class? (There is, in Browne, something of a younger George Bush—capable, confident, unself-questioning—just as Holliwell, in his jejune benevolence, obliquely suggested Jimmy Carter.)

Once again Stone is putting America on trial. The key witness is Ron Strickland, a maker of documentary films who has been contracted by the Hylan Corporation to record Matty Hylan's triumphal circumnavigation and who stays on, after the corporate boy-wonder absconds, to film Browne's story. Strickland is an aging hipster in the Rheinhardt/Gordon Walker mode, though he's much more capable and productive than either of them. In Strickland's case, corruption and purity have merged to produce a repugnantly charismatic amalgam. The purity is manifest in Strickland's drive to tell something as close as possible to the truth in his documentaries—and his willingness to pay for it. Once in Vietnam a group of tunnel rats who didn't like Strickland's style tied him overnight in an enemy tunnel. “‘But I take comfort,’” Strickland says. “‘I was doing my job. Follow truth too close by the heels, it kicks you in the teeth. Famous saying.’”

But it's in Strickland's idea of truth that his limitations lie. He is an instinctive proponent of the view that the worst truth about some person or thing is the most central truth. “‘Christ,’” says Strickland's assistant Hersey, as he watches Central American footage in which an American diplomat tries to explain himself, “‘you really open them up.’” “‘I get them to spread,’ Strickland said. ‘That I do.’” Strickland is pivotal to an understanding of this book not only because his perceptions are more intense and provocative than the other characters', but also because he shares more with Robert Stone than his initials. The two are drawn to similar subject matter: Strickland's film on Vietnam, L. Z. Bravo, brings Dog Soldiers to mind, just as his work in progress on Central America recalls A Flag for Sunrise. Strickland also shares some biographical data with Stone. Both the character and his creator grew up as only children in intense communion with itinerant, educated, possibly deranged mothers, and both have strong associations with New York.

Surely Stone doesn't mean us to draw a correspondence between Strickland's character and his own. Strickland is a consistently unethical man: selfish, manipulative, cruel. What's at stake in the resemblance is the stature of Stone's own work, throughout his career, but chiefly here, in Outerbridge Reach. Is this book, like Strickland's films, a product of a reductive fallacy? Does it ungenerously reduce its characters to their most pitiable or repugnant qualities, and thereby give its audience a facile sense of superiority? Such charges have been made against Stone in the past.

By putting Strickland in the novel, by showing the limits of his character and suggesting the limits of his art, Stone, it seems to me, is trying to pass beyond whatever there is in himself that would be satisfied with Strickland's kind of simplifications. To what degree, then, is the novelistic sensibility that organizes our view of the Brownes different from the sensibility of the filmmaker who is busy creating what will inevitably be a lacerating vision of them and their world? At times Stone and Strickland seem to merge, as in this passage in which Strickland takes in the scene at a Manhattan club where the entertainment is being provided by a band called Low Density Babylon:

Low Density Babylon ground on; the dancers splayed their hands and boogied. It was a weeknight and a weeknight crowd had turned out: a few blacks who could dance, a few of Hersey's fellow students, a contingent of English media scum. The English imagined themselves and their schemes invisible and danced with abandon, looking goatish and soiled. Strickland had observed that they were always the best dancers in the place. Lights played on their toothy faces.

The passage is essential Strickland: witty, pungent, worldly, unpleasant, giving no quarter. But it's also vintage Stone. Note the characteristic skill with which he balances precise observation with allegorical intimations. There's a background whisper of Babylonian corruption, Poe's dancing maskers, fire and plague—but it's conveyed subtly, with no damage done to the realistic texture of the book. The word “soiled” is a favorite of Stone's; it occurs a number of times in the novel, always connoting inevitable human corruption, paradise not so much lost as befouled.

You can easily conceive the results when Strickland, fresh from making the powers in Central American spread, sets to work on Owen Browne. One of Strickland's most useful attributes is a stutter that gets men like Browne thinking that he's an inept weakling to whom they can, in brave language, explain life's meanings:

Idea-wise, Strickland found that Browne had a few nuggets for the camera:

“I think most of us spend our lives without ever having to find out what we're made of. Our lives are soft in this country. In the present day a man can live his whole life and never test his true resources.”

And also: “The sea is the bottom line. Out there you have the elementals. You have day and night. You have ocean and sky. Your boat and yourself. It's a situation of ultimate self-reliance.”

“The great American virtue,” Strickland said. He was not averse to helping out.

Strickland mocks Browne unequivocally, though Browne is a touch too dense to pick up on it. Stone, however, reserves a higher regard for physical courage, even when it comes unaccompanied by developed powers of self-appraisal. He seems to concur with Browne's lines about our lives being too soft and about our failure to seek significant challenges. The sentiment is evident in his treatment of Browne, and it was underlined in a recent article in The New York Times in which Stone castigated Americans for having “made a virtue of mediocrity,” and went to the length of offering mobsters some ambivalent praise for taking risks and living by a code. “Self-interest,” he said at the close of the piece, “can take us only so far. At a certain point, human nature rejects it as an end, requiring something higher and finer.” Owen Browne would agree.

But Browne isn't up to the quest he takes on. His self-reliance proves about as effective at sea as the other deluded variants on the Emersonian virtue do in Stone's visions of Vietnam and Central America. It's not long into the race before Browne, cast back on his own spiritual resources, finds himself close to bankrupt. He has never developed the kind of inner life that would arise from playing principles off against measured amounts of skepticism, measured doses of irony. For Browne, to disbelieve a little is to disbelieve all; and on the ocean, without society's assurances, a little disbelief is easy.

Unable to converse fruitfully with himself, Browne is talked to by others. He attends to the voice of his father who has been dead for many years, to the voices of evangelists coming over his ship radio, and then, through the evangelists, to something he dimly feels is the voice of an alien, disapproving God. Self-reliance undone, Browne finds authorities to fill the empty inward space. As Browne's identity dissolves, Stone's prose becomes sparer, toward the end verging on a blank anonymity. Here Browne, in a deserted house on an empty island, reflecting on his inadequacies and on his willingness to cheat in order to win the race, touches on despair:

On this ocean, Browne thought, goodbye to almanacs and hope in Stella Maris and the small rain down. This is a game beyond me. A diver, he felt as though he were breathing from an empty tank. His windpipe contracted in its greed for the thin stream. His gasps went unrewarded. He knelt down on the floor of the house. He felt the suspension of hope and wished for it back. He regretted lying.

The authorial voice is detached, but it is not without elegiacal intimations, not without some respect for Browne.

Left home while Browne goes off to the race is his wife, who also undergoes something of a fall. Like Owen, she looks back to the Vietnam War as the most intense, and even the happiest, part of her life: “She remembered the happiness of youth and the feeling of fuck the world, the proud acceptance of honor, duty, and risk. In spite of everything they had proved life against their pulses then, beat by beat.” Now Anne is conservative, respectable, and reined in. At the start of the book, she's writing for a yachting magazine, rendering airbrushed versions of the kind of voyage that will ruin her husband.

With Owen gone, Anne descends first into liquor. Stone is an American laureate of alcohol. No one is better at portraying the subtle, pleasing enhancements of consciousness, and the sudden self-lacerations, to which liquor soothes the way. Here Anne, not without sympathy from Stone, steps gingerly off the wagon:

Scotch from a decanter. Sipping hers, Anne savored the tawny glow of the lamps and the bright apartment and the heavy-browed elegance of the unhappy man across the room from her. Drinking it, she soon missed her clear head and regretted the wasted days of self-denial. In spite of that, the drink made her feel better. Owen, she thought, what have you left me to?

To Strickland, among other things: it is not long before Anne descends into an affair with the filmmaker. She is drawn to Strickland out of hopes for more life, as a way of toppling her boredom. Strickland comes after Anne, a woman he calls “a big creamy bitch,” at least in part to tear down her high-toned self-image. He wants her to understand that she's not so unlike Pamela, the prostitute who is Strickland's intermittent sidekick. (“She looked capable of anything,” Strickland thinks observing Pamela, “at the point of becoming either the perpetrator of a major felony or the victim of one.”) Strickland's appetite for the “truth” acts up here: he takes it as a personal affront when he encounters anyone who doesn't know the worst about himself or herself, and where possible he offers tutelage.

Soon he has Anne broken down. She crops her hair close to her head (“for disgrace,” she says, more truly than she's aware) and takes to wearing tight silk out of deference to Strickland's tastes. (“Silk. Skin. Something visual. So we can see where everything is.”) Anne's visual transformation, I assume, is the erotic equivalent of Owen's own surrender of himself and willingness to cheat. What the ocean does to Owen, Strickland does to Anne. In neither case does it take long. In neither case is the resistance offered anything to marvel at.

And it is the relative ease with which Owen and Anne come apart that makes the book something less than tragic. Though Stone sometimes pulls back and makes a nasty pronouncement about the Brownes, in general he takes pains to inhabit them as sympathetically as possible; in this regard he is distinct from Strickland, who will surely take every opportunity, small and great, to humiliate Anne and Owen in his film. Still, by choosing the Brownes, and particularly Owen, to represent the middle class in a book that aims to be an allegory of American life now, Stone is, I think, emulating Strickland with a reduction of his own.

For Stone could have picked a smarter and hipper character to fill Browne's place. By creating a character with Browne's particular defects, Stone has made his own conclusions about the general ineptitude of the comfortable classes seem a little rigged, a little too easy to achieve. (In A Flag for Sunrise, by contrast, Stone came up with Holliwell, a figure of genuine, if flawed, feeling and intelligence, who succeeds in implicating the reader in ways that Browne cannot.) By using Browne, Stone barred his novel from reaching an authentically tragic dimension, prevented it from rising far above the limits of Strickland's art. Moment to moment, Outerbridge Reach surpasses the filmmaker in subtlety and tact, but in its overall design, it is the work of someone who is satisfied with setting up a large target and then blowing it away.