Robert Stone
Sep. 15th, 2008 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseIn, oh I dunno, 1985? Summer? I wanted to take one summer credit and I decided it should be something SIGNIFICANT that would EXPAND me. I went into a philosophy class one warm summer night, sat in my customary front row, off to the right side...
And ran out screaming in five minutes. Apologizing and screaming.
I ran across the University College quad frantically leafing through my calendar and ended up in what sounded like a breezy bird course: "American Authors since 1965". Well, that one course blew away all the myriad cobwebs from the rest of my English degree. Along with Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker and Ann Tyler, I was introduced to Robert Stone through his book "A Flag for Sunrise."
Since then, I've rediscovered him several times. In Alice LaPlante's "Making of a Story," she includes his brilliant short story "Helping" and then I just stumbled across his 1992 novle, "Outbridge Reach: at the library. He writes with such amazing clarity, pathos, fearlessness in a language that is at once shockingly poetic and incredibly straightforward.
He's especially brilliant at examining people's lives at points of maximum stress or dislocation. I am thinking of the husband and wife in "Helping" as they deal in a kind of dispassionate fury with the psychopathic phone treats they are receiving in the middle of a drunken argument. I am thinking of the final, excruciating hike of a character in Rain Dogs as he uses all his mental and physical resources to walk out of a desert with a stash of drugs. I am thinking of the radical reactions to mid-life crisis in Outbridge Reach.
If there is anyone whose writing I am trying to emulate now, it is his. I want to write dark fantasies with the vaulting scope of Dickens and the poetic economy of Stone. That's what I want.
And ran out screaming in five minutes. Apologizing and screaming.
I ran across the University College quad frantically leafing through my calendar and ended up in what sounded like a breezy bird course: "American Authors since 1965". Well, that one course blew away all the myriad cobwebs from the rest of my English degree. Along with Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker and Ann Tyler, I was introduced to Robert Stone through his book "A Flag for Sunrise."
Since then, I've rediscovered him several times. In Alice LaPlante's "Making of a Story," she includes his brilliant short story "Helping" and then I just stumbled across his 1992 novle, "Outbridge Reach: at the library. He writes with such amazing clarity, pathos, fearlessness in a language that is at once shockingly poetic and incredibly straightforward.
He's especially brilliant at examining people's lives at points of maximum stress or dislocation. I am thinking of the husband and wife in "Helping" as they deal in a kind of dispassionate fury with the psychopathic phone treats they are receiving in the middle of a drunken argument. I am thinking of the final, excruciating hike of a character in Rain Dogs as he uses all his mental and physical resources to walk out of a desert with a stash of drugs. I am thinking of the radical reactions to mid-life crisis in Outbridge Reach.
If there is anyone whose writing I am trying to emulate now, it is his. I want to write dark fantasies with the vaulting scope of Dickens and the poetic economy of Stone. That's what I want.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:26 am (UTC)Thanks for sharing this. It gives some very interesting context. I've never read any of Stone's work; I guess I'll have to add that to my perpetual growing list.