{"id":81467,"date":"2015-01-12T13:59:11","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T18:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81467"},"modified":"2015-01-12T14:25:49","modified_gmt":"2015-01-12T19:25:49","slug":"robert-stone-1937-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Stone, 1937\u20132015"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"stone-r1985\"

From our Winter 1985 issue: \u201cA Robert Stone manuscript page, from his most recent novel, Children of Light<\/i>; an indication of how barren the word processor has made examples of a work-in-progress.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI like big novels,\u201d Robert Stone said in his 1985 Art of Fiction interview<\/a>. \u201cI really admire the grand slam.\u201d Stone died last weekend in Florida, at seventy-seven. He leaves behind more than a few grand slams\u2014broad, despairing, powerful books full of searchers, outsiders, and misfits. His work exudes what Jessica Hagedorn calls \u201cexquisite paranoia and apocalyptic dread.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, descriptions like that can make his novels sound too <\/em>potent\u2014and one of the surprising things about Stone, it must be said, is how little he\u2019s read these days. I hope that will change. As M. H. Miller wrote of him in 2013<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\n

He\u2019s a best-selling author whose work has been heaped with critical praise, but because of the long interims between books, he is more heard of than read by a certain generation of readers. Updike had Rabbit, Roth had Zuckerman, Norman Mailer had Gary Gilmore, even Joan Didion, whose novels are the least interesting thing about her, had Maria Wyeth. Among Mr. Stone\u2019s books there is no clear standout, no obvious introduction. His work is best taken in tandem, like one long narrative where you age with the characters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He\u2019s right: among readers my age, Stone\u2019s work has had that enviable air of mystery to it. He was always that major writer lurking in the distance. His books didn\u2019t seem approachable, not because they were long or \u201cdifficult\u201d but because, as the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> put it, they \u201cresonate with philosophical concerns<\/a>, the thin divides between life and death, good and evil, God and godlessness.\u201d These were tomes about war and God and postwar tumult, and, uh, we definitely wanted to get to them, yes, but\u2014maybe later? <\/p>\n

And yet anyone who wanted to ignore him soon learned that you could not.\u00a0Dog Soldiers<\/em>, in particular, loomed large. The people who mentioned Stone were people who knew their shit\u2014older, wiser folks\u2014and they usually invoked him solemnly, with wide eyes and dilating pupils. You got the sense that maybe these weren\u2019t books for the young: Stone was not about to be cosseted by a new and fawning generation.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s wrong to make him sound so forbidding. What the obits haven\u2019t pointed out\u2014at least not the ones I\u2019ve read\u2014is Stone\u2019s grim sense of humor, his gift for a certain kind of comic writing that does everything except make you laugh. (Though in parts of Prime Green<\/em> he\u2019s positively lighthearted, and often makes you laugh.) Thousands of dust-jacket flaps have depleted the phrase \u201cdarkly comic,\u201d applying it to anyone who\u2019s ever spent money at Hot Topic, but the writers who earn it are those like Stone, whose sensibilities were minted in the sixties and seventies, when perilously humorless men were running the world and irony was the most vital weapon in the counterculture\u2019s arsenal. \u201cIrony is my friend and brother,\u201d Stone told The Paris Review<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s always some humor in all the awfulness I write about.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sells himself short, I think\u2014there\u2019s more than some<\/em>. In that same issue<\/a> of the Review<\/em> was an excerpt from Children of Light<\/em>, Stone\u2019s latest novel at the time, in which Gordon Walker, a failed playwright, seeks out his schizophrenic ex, Lu Anne, in Mexico. Look at the glorious, surreal terror in this portion, where scatology meets eschatology. It hints at Stone\u2019s complicated, rueful, very Catholic search for faith\u2014of the same tint as Flannery O\u2019Connor or Denis Johnson.<\/p>\n

\n

Lu Anne was lying in the stack of seed husks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d he said, \u201cthat looks comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, yes,\u201d she said, \u201cvery comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

He lay down beside her in the warm sun and buried his arms in the seeds.<\/p>\n

\u201cDownright primal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPrimal is right,\u201d Lu Anne said. She laughed at him and shook her head. \u201cYou don\u2019t know what this pile is do you? Do you? Because you\u2019re a city boy.\u201d<\/p>\n

She sat in the pile, sweeping aside the seed husks with a rowing motion until the manure it covered was exposed and she sat naked in a mix of mud and droppings, swarming with tiny pale creatures that fled the light.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere it is,\u201d she told Walker. \u201cThe pigshit at the end of the rainbow. Didn\u2019t you always know it was there?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll get an infection,\u201d Walker said. He was astonished at what Lu Anne had revealed to him. \u201cYou\u2019re cut.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOut here waiting to be claimed, Gordon. Ain\u2019t it mystical? How about a drink, man?\u201d<\/p>\n

When he bent to offer her the bottle she pulled him down into the pile beside her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a feeling you\u2019d do that,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought \u2026\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStop explaining,\u201d Lu Anne told him. Just shut up and groove on your pigshit. You earned it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess it must work something like an orgone box,\u201d Walker suggested.<\/p>\n

\u201cWalker,\u201d Lu Anne said, \u201cwhen will it cease, the incessant din of your goddam speculation? Will only death suffice to shut your cottonpicking mouth?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMerciful heaven! Show the man a pile of shit and he\u2019ll tell you how it works.\u201d She made a wad of mud and pig manure and threw it in his face. \u201cThere, baby. There\u2019s your orgone. Have an orgone-ism.\u201d<\/p>\n

She watched Walker attempt to brush the manure from his eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWasn\u2019t that therapeutic?\u201d she asked. \u201cNow you get the blessing.\u201d She reached out and rubbed the stuff on his forehead in the form of a cross. \u201cIn the name of pigshit and pigshit and pigshit. Amen. Let us reflected in this holy season on the transience of being and all the stuff we done wrong. Let\u2019s have Brother Walker here give us only a tiny sampling of the countless words at his command to tell us how we\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNot well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, we are,\u201d Lu Anne told him. \u201cWe\u2019re going with the flow. This is where the flow goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wondered,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Stone excelled at many things. One of them, certainly, was showing us the pigshit at the end of the rainbow. I hope there are more writers who know the way there.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI like big novels,\u201d Robert Stone said in his 1985 Art of Fiction interview. \u201cI really admire the grand slam.\u201d Stone died last weekend in Florida, at seventy-seven. He leaves behind more than a few grand slams\u2014broad, despairing, powerful books full of searchers, outsiders, and misfits. His work exudes what Jessica Hagedorn calls \u201cexquisite paranoia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6215,16567,5460,2530,16566,1888,20537,16568,16569,11989,1786,9063,7782],"class_list":["post-81467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-catholicism","tag-children-of-light","tag-deaths","tag-denis-johnson","tag-dog-soldiers","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-in-memoriam","tag-jessica-hagedorn","tag-m-h-miller","tag-obituaries","tag-religion","tag-robert-stone","tag-the-art-of-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Pigshit at the End of the Rainbow: Remembering Robert Stone<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A look back at Robert Stone, who died on January 10, featuring an excerpt from his novel \u201cChildren of Light.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Robert Stone, 1937\u20132015 by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 12, 2015 \u2013 \u201cI like big novels,\u201d Robert Stone said in his 1985 Art of Fiction interview. \u201cI really admire the grand slam.\u201d Stone died last weekend in Florida, at\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-01-12T18:59:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-01-12T19:25:49+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/stone-r1985.gif\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"700\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"913\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Robert Stone, 1937\u20132015\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-01-12T18:59:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-01-12T19:25:49+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/\"},\"wordCount\":1085,\"commentCount\":7,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/robert-stone-1937-2015\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/stone-r1985.gif\",\"keywords\":[\"Catholicism\",\"Children of Light\",\"deaths\",\"Denis Johnson\",\"Dog Soldiers\",\"Flannery O'Connor\",\"In Memoriam\",\"Jessica Hagedorn\",\"M. 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