RAVE: Robert Stone's "Bay of Souls"
Jorn Barger
I avoided all reviews of the new Robert Stone until I got a
chance to read it, but I've now gone back and read a dozen
or two-- pretty disgraceful!
Reviewers should be jubilant that our greatest living writer
has produced a short masterpiece, but led by the NY Times
the reviews have been malicious or at best tepid. (They
also consistently get plot-details wrong.)
One bizarre complaint is that it's too short (he ruthlessly
whittled it down from his normal length, presumably so it
could be taught in college classes); another is that the
plot is too familiar! Book reviewers seem determined to
judge according to some personal yardstick, and so are
unwilling to engage original works on their own terms.
The epigraph from Robert Graves clues us that it's a Black
Goddess melodrama, with Stone's standard decent-weakling
protagonist swept away by an amoral sex-goddess (cf his
"Children of Light"), but what none of the reviewers mention
is Stone's _unprecedented_ ability to make us wonder "how
could he possibly know all that?"
Although it's only 250 pages, and reads very quickly,
Stone has compressed more insight than four normal novels--
he starts with a midwestern academic family novel, slides
into an exploration of sexual extremism, glimpses a
realm of political intrigues much subtler than anything
else I've read, and then explodes into a voodoo-mysticism
that finally abandons the drug-subjectivity disclaimer he's
been hiding behind in all his earlier works, and declares
firmly for the reality of occult phenomena.
In passing we get a devastating critique of American higher
education, which I think confirms this book as a dare to
lit teachers everywhere. The first chapter (online) stands
beautifully as a short story:
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=681770
It includes a hilarious image of a drunken, enraged hunter
wrestling with a dead deer in a wheelbarrow, that becomes
a major motif, echoed especially via characters in
wheelchairs. The reviews I've read cited enough other
tidbits of imagery that I'm confident the book will prove
endlessly rich for the lit-crit crowd, and that some
decades hence we'll even get to read the longer version
(if there's any justice).