The moral vision of Robert Stone:
Finn, James
THE MORAL VISION OF JAMES FINN ROBERT STONE THE TRANSCENDENT IN THE MUCK OF...
...Winner of the American Academy of Religion's Anne, whom he gradually seduces...
...Nevertheless, in a reference to Central America he can assert, "we have incurred a blood ENTRAPMENT debt, and it is coming up for payment...
...sobn flail Wd JIMM ASSN J she has spent fourteen years in Nguc Linh Province ("We call it God's country...
...There are no writers I'm aware of gance of the place settings, and the vastness of the brownwho are doing the same sort of thing I'm doing because I take stone interiors...
...touched his self-regard...
...marked by heavy booze and drugs, suicide, murder, conspira- It would be different...
...And so far as I know the only one...
...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...
...Yes," Converse responds...
...What a misunderstanding it had New in Paper...
...Pablo Tabor...
...the American anthropologist Frank Holliwell, a for- should make any difference to you...
...refers to the influence of his early Catholic schooling, has said The first fifteen minutes threatened to justify my fears...
...These impulses both mean," he explained, "because of the U.S...
...Each essay focuses of his novels...
...In some cases the relation- essay on Robert ship is sufficiently obscure to lend itself to highly speculative Stone is another in interpretation...
...presence in Vietnam...
...The most recently published article in the series was written by Paul Giles on Donald BarthJAMES FINN is senior editor of Freedom Review, the bimonthly mag- elme (November 8, 1991...
...Only ass- selves out in the ensuing action...
...Here is a leading This is easy to believe...
...It is and the reader-are led to contemplate their fate in a context set primarily in the Central American country of Tecan where larger than the revolution...
...Put one foot to front Zecca of the U.S...
...An odd series of inci- -Commonweal...
...It can draw on sensual imagery and evoke the most del- culture, religion, history, art, and literature...
...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...
...We and very well written...
...cy, treachery, torture, varied child mutilations, self-question- Campos and Egan: "I am not an animal," Campos said...
...happy period of his life, certainly not one of deprivation...
...It would be strange to see people who believed in way into the novel...
...However, that things would be better, but invariably they landed back in on the basis of his most recent novel it is clear that he is still New York...
...Stone skillfully orchestrates their ups and downs, their somewhere in the world a Jew raises quivering gray finmeetings and mergings and partings even as he propels them gers to his weasely throat and falls dead...
...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...
...0 horrible...
...His most deeply moving scenes occur when, And then it did begin...
...His only distractions from his increasingly desperate plight are his thoughts and a missionary radio station that dramatizes stories from the Bible...
...So too, do reflections that touch the inner dience is oddly reminiscent of the antic scene in Greene's The life, the core of the person...
...He says that he does not believe that the course the U.S...
...vated rhetoric, and that easily folds into the narrative quotations Before the novel ends, it has skewered-O horrible, from or references to sources as diverse as Shakespeare, Donne, Americans-northern liberals in the South, advertising, radio Hopkins, Dante and Yeats, Cromwell and La Boheme...
...that it's hard to ignore religion "when you mess with acid," and Setting the scene, Scorsese's camera seems to wallow in the he knows these concerns distinguish him from most other luxury of Wharton's bon ton: the quantity of food, the eleAmerican novelists today...
...Theological Studies...
...the Callahans, a me...
...unite and separate Pablo and Holliwell, and the reader is left Marie Zecca: "It's not all one thing or the other, you to parse these yearnings and to reflect on how they work themknow...
...The study was conducted 1 by Freedom Forum First Amendment Center Visiting Professional Scholars John Dart former president of the Religious Newswriters Association, and Jimmy R. , 8kid~ng the GOP" Me~a Allen, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention...
...He gradually realizes that his boat, for which he had writ- described by contemporary philosophy of science...
...Books discussed in this essay A Hall of Mirrors, Penguin, .57.95, 411 pp...
...space they occupy...
...This note of religion tied to misplaced hope, false entrepreneurship, and cynicism recurs throughout the book...
...Pritchett is a wise and penetrating crit- too handily...
...At his of Stone's stories...
...With this book, his particular vision, which will also inform his later books, becomes clearer...
...I believe in life after death...
...It is all the more $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper disappointing to encounter the few faults that mar some pas- At bookstores, or call 607-277-2211 (credit card orders only, please sages...
...and special group...
...Truth had been a barely visible shimmer...
...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...
...nounced...
...ham Greene, but they remain, in spite of his vigorous appro- "It," of course, is Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, priation of them, a weak pillar in the architechtonics of his work...
...So it had been in the war...
...interests to return...
...potential revolution in Tecan...
...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...
...cal-pragmatic perspective since James's Varieties...
...Equally evangelists, corrupt politicians, strident anticommunism, ignorstriking is Stone's ear, his dialogue ringing with complete con- ant patriotism, racism, conspiracy kooks, militarism, and the viction...
...and a num- "That's all?...Don't you think everybody got some special ber of subsidiary others...
...58 illus...
...get, and that leftover summer fluff, Sleepless in A legacy of the '60s in which he was shaping his political Seattle...
...seem incongruous to add that there are also scenes of consid- "Yes, yes, of course...
...They're trying to take that fat old woman off the book is Stone's language, already an admirably supple in- her Greyhound Bus....The lady's bus is approaching...
...He misuses "fulsome" as it is frequently misused Cornell instead of using it correctly to mean excessively offensive...
...As he realizes he cannot win, Browne is argues for the rationality of Christian belief by showing that subjected to extreme pressures, physical, mental, and spiritu- theological reasoning is similar to scientific reasoning as al...
...A number of different views are The impulse stripped down was to love her or destroy her...
...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...
...is our nation's strength...
...Its overall story line is cleaner, less cluttered...
...The people we encounter are mainly the loners, the teeming brains of gypsies turn to gum...
...After they and Stone developed a mutual dislike, number of years and each adding, if unevenly, to Stone's Stone cut out, with the feeling, later revised, that he was, at stature and reputation...
...Insofar as these represent polar posi- on contemporary tions, Stone is definitely closer to the second...
...More remarkable than the structure of menace...
...The story of Converse and those whose lives he touches provides one response to the question of who "we" are...
...The Countess ty, their true self...
...It is a universe in which God may be absent give a welcoming dinner party for her, but-the gentry disbut evil is almost palpable...
...Because she was in and out of hospitals, between the about our common world, about the state of our ages six and ten he was placed in an orphanage operated by souls...
...And Holliwell, an honorable man, The Vietnam debacle is invoked as an augury of the role of admires and is attracted to various aspects of Sister Justin: "...she the U.S...
...d the New S iteliloan an Among the findings of the report: The study is critical of the press for not giving adequate attention to the complex and emotional subject of religion and also faults organized religion for often resorting to "'media bashing" and preferring publicity over probing, analytic coverage...
...Tom "Da use of you, mon...
...God, he thought, it's truth I love and always have...
...She and Anne back home...
...has trod is simply some SCREEN horror story of racism and murder...
...first novel of the year was the precursor of the many awards The high school that Stone attended was also run by the Stone's novels have received...
...The strument that can pass readily from the low colloquial to ele- fiend stirs...
...Owen Browne, a veteran of Vietnam combat and a de- New in Paper...
...Religious figures fear being misunderstood...
...We live in a world, after all, in which even Vietnam is trying to entice U.S...
...This and Dog Soldiers) were turned into major but unsatisfactory lady is as innocent as she is fat and motherly...
...The final scenes of the book, both on land and EDITED BY RICHARD K. EMMERSON sea, are harrowing as Anne and Browne recognize and greet AND BERNARD MCGINN the fate they have helped prepare for themselves...
...And continued with a sort of muragainst a sense of the possibly transcendent, his characters act muring boldness that was amazing after its blaring beginning...
...What does the whose husband effectively disappeared when Robert was an Catholic sensibility of Robert Stone have to tell us infant...
...It is a large sprawling Australian abos turn to the wall and die...
...From there Converse goes to a drug scene...
...This lady movies...
...0, America-horrible...
...The Apocalypse in Anne's trials are, in their own way, almost as severe as she the Middle Ages is forced to reevaluate her past, her present betrayal, and an uncertain future...
...One could have given the same advice to Dostoevsky, of most of his peers, not its essential nature...
...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...
...explores the influence of the Apocalypse on the shaping of His language is a gift and an attainment, the glory and strength the Christian culture of the Middle Ages...
...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...
...He learns that 10: 5 November 1993 Commonweal Commonweal 5 November 1993: 11 "An unhealthy distrust exists between religionists and journalists...
...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...
...the vile lieutenant Father Egan and Sister Justin: "Interesting my orthodoxy Campos...
...Accepting his premise SCORSESE MEETS WHARTON for the nonce, it would be interesting to learn who or what country he thinks is going to attempt to collect on that debt...
...Much of the undeniable strength of r ' Please send me a complimentary copy of Bridging the Gap: Religion and the...
...high matters, and draws the reader into the deeply imagined It is in this climate of uncertainty about and distrust of U.S...
...7.95, 342 pp...
...He would be...
...Dog Soldiers, Penguin...
...He frequently this novel's texture...
...The scene in which a drunken Holliwell In context these exchanges resonate, they reflect back and delivers his scheduled Tecan speech to a gradually hostile au- forth on each other...
...A powerful vision but not a pretty one...
...The torture and murder of children was something more Hollywood, his send-up of Tinseltown has strong important than even the establishment of revolution, surely...
...In spite of forebodings which he shares Theology in the Age with his wife, Anne, he accepts the challenge...
...ruling class, advising their conscripts in counterinsurgency and overseeing their armaments, and not compromising your honor...
...Stone introduces these characters on different lines of ac- Holliwell: "It would be strange to see such Catholics," he tion, one whole set making their entrance one quarter of the thought...
...He is the greatest living American film director, ic, but with the first part of his advice he has, I think, gone off but it's only the quality of his work that sets it apart from that the rails...
...Their talk is of religion, and her parting comment is an admonitory assertion: "Satan is very powerful here...
...as brought to the screen by Martin Scorsese and (in an access V. S. Pritchett has said of Stone that "he should stifle his ten- of courage or insanity) given mass release by Columbia...
...He has seen and felt and imagined what war best, Stone achieves that fusion, technique and vision, style and can do, and has reflected on what part it plays in the American substance, becoming one...
...Bitel's book is exceptionally well researched voted husband and father, is a relatively square citizen...
...Violence and drugs in Vietnam are directly related to drugs and violence in the States...
...way, transmuted, into Stone's fiction...
...noted and probed: Stripped further it was towards both these ends, to subsume Oscar Ocampo: "We're all whores here...
...We didn't know who we were until we got here," he says...
...The relation between the life and work of highly imagina- James Finn's critical tive writers can vary remarkably...
...Nips disembowel themselves, the incident...
...terious Mr...
...It documents a "wide chasm" between "two alien cultures...
...But wasn't Scorsese overdoing it...
...This collection of essays by an impressive array of medievalists Stone has said that he writes good prose, and that he does...
...Wouldn't public testimony that he takes very seriously the question of Scorsese, however much craft he put into this project, coarsen God's presence-or absence-in the world...
...Like approving in advance of her contemplated divorce-each in14: 5 November 1993 Commonweal...
...of their own accessories...
...Outerbridge Reach, Ticknor & Fields, $21.95, 409 pp...
...succeeded in projecting very powerfully a vision of America, Although he attended New York University for about a year, delineating his view of Americans, their present condition, and he is essentially an autodidact with wide-ranging interests and, their cultural landscape...
...ten cheerleader advertising copy, is a piece of decomposing CORNELL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION...
...You can figure," Converse is told, "your troubles started over in Nam...
...The William Faulkner Foundation award for the best ing out to do...
...og Soldiers (1974), Stone's second novel, equally large in ambition, is more controlled in execution...
...Because Stone Catholic writers of has been generous in disclosing major aspects of his life in fiction...
...But Stone's first novel, Hall of Mirrors (1967), gave notice that since his mother, who served as his reference point to reality, here was a new and original voice, marked by a distinctive sen- often looked at things from an odd angle, he had a lot of sortsibility...
...But the Vietnam War that was background in the first novel is here brought forward...
...I her in flesh and spirit...
...On one return trip, their funds were so low they on a rising trajectory whose end is not yet in sight...
...that one does not always succeed...
...A large number of people with quite terms that apply to the revolution, but also to a realm that trandifferent backgrounds and interest are to be caught up in the scends quotidian life and politics...
...icate or the most sinister atmosphere...
...A Flag for Sunrise, Ballantine, $3.95, 439 pp...
...Same as everbody...
...Confronted with her, sus taker in the black slums of New Orleans...
...tings and characters instead of making us intimate with them...
...Stone has given a good deal of Scorsese is a filmmaker of sensation, not sensibility...
...We thought we were something else...
...But scenes, comic scenes, near-tragic scenes, but they will fail to was it not all of a piece-Campos on the coast, the president engage many readers...
...We have interviews, articles, and talks, we can know some of what he asked our essayists himself thinks has helped shape his views and inform his imag- to give an overview ination...
...Stone is a risk-taker and it is in the nature of risk Because that sounds very tricky to me...
...foreign while in the adjoining theaters, behind walls so thin you can policies are not outrageous or simple-minded as are those of hear the gunfire and the shrieks and the thuds, Stallone and Van Oliver Stone nor wooden and predictable as were those of Gra- Damme and Bruce Willis pound their enemies to pulp...
...The Epistemology of Religious Experience "Another man might have done it-have taken the prize and WILLIAM P. ALSTON spent the rest of his life in secret laughter...
...He belongs, it is clear, in the demanding apparently, a capacious memory...
...Like old times...
...Altogether, slept out on a roof...
...holes think like that...
...A moral vision as intense as Stone's can be communicated War and references to war are, it seems, an inevitable part artistically only if it is fused with techniques equal to it...
...This has nothing Ellen Olenska, born and bred a New Yorker, but married into to do with the "enrich your inner life, make money, and dis- the Polish nobility, has fled Europe and her disastrous marcover God" pitch, and everything to do with locating the self riage and taken shelter with her relatives...
...For the novel is not an abstract political tract, but an chosen narrative form and established what are now its recog- incisive rendering of different kinds of people who are drawn nizable characteristics.They are evident in A Flag for Sunrise into the vortex of the gathering political storm...
...After that he and his mother lived together reach sometimes exceeds his grasp...
...mer CIA agent in Vietnam...
...Of Ronald Reagan, Stone has said that There it is, in the same suburban multiplex that is only his charm is authentic...
...Enter Ron Strickland, cynical and corrupt, to whom, in a separate line of of Scientific Reasoning action, we have been introduced as he is completing a docu- NANCEY MURPHY mentary film in Central America...
...D Vietnam experience and recent Central American conflicts...
...In alternating scenes, we 1992 Awards for Excellence in the Study of Religion...
...Match de dolluh wif de day...
...restless, perverse American couple who smuggle dope...
...In a physical detail and Wharton's people are certainly the slaves sense, I'm a theologian...
...This lady is drifters, the god-forsaken, strung-out losers who, during their Columbia my friends...
...But the answers remain ever elusive...
...academia as a writer-in-residence ("a kind of dropout's revenge") In the heart of that bomb, mysteriously but truly present, and in Hollywood, where two of his books (A Hall of Mirrors is a fat old lady on her way to see the world's fair...
...He remains one of the few American experience...
...Between then and 1992, four other Marists, who attempted to impart a strongly dogmatic view of novels followed, each separated from its predecessor by a Catholicism...
...azine published by Freedom House...
...For, like his peers, I believe, with as much effect...
...Commonweal 5 November 1993: 9 him to California in the early 1960s, where he soon clued in character, speaking to the large crowd gathered for a great pawith Ken Kesey, becoming one of the Merry Pranksters and an triotic revival meeting...
...in such a way that it raises questions about their inner identi- For me, the ignition was a snub to the heroine...
...He has also spent time in on a cluster of gibbering chinks, it's a bomb with a heart...
...This lady is chinkbane...
...may be suggested by an extended quotation...
...It's sort of a joke...
...It's not us being the bad guys all the time...
...He could no more take a prize by subterfuge than he the epistemology of mysticism from a sophisticated analyticould sail to the white port of his dreams...
...His critical views of U.S...
...They seem highly familiar, even conventional...
...Surely you don't believe...
...American dream...
...He is capable of U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S describing a restaurant as being "mellifluent with Vivaldi," which Sage House • 512 East State Street • Ithaca NY 14850 Commonweal 5 November 1993: 13 will not do, and of writing in a crucial passage that "Everything Francois Mauriac, Stone could say of himself, "I am a metaseemed obviated in its plainsong," which is questionable at physician of the concrete...
...ally bent and an informer for the CIA...
...These concerns do not make him unique among American When would this travelogue into the past cease and the writers-as he seems to think-but they do place him in a small drama begin...
...THE MORAL VISION OF JAMES FINN ROBERT STONE THE TRANSCENDENT IN THE MUCK OF HISTORY Robert Stone is a highly ambitious author whose the Marist brothers...
...Her family tries to in the universe...
...policy in Tecan, American-sponsored shithole after another, partying with their and those who are drawn into the clash between the two...
...the renowned writer Oscar Ocampo, now sexu- "Well," Egan said, "you're supposed to answer it every day...
...as a missionary...
...It charges the story, propelling the reader into on some aspect of John's great visionary text, analyzing its the most violent action even as it invites reflection on that ac- interpretation, representation, and applications in medieval tion...
...Born in Brooklyn in 1937, Stone cates the central human drama, the big questions, was reared mostly in Manhattan by a schizophrenic mother the religious crisis of our time...
...He is tempted to claim the race Perceiving God and the prize by deception...
...Arguably the most important investigation of all been...
...Further, they(1981), which equals if it does not surpass its predecessor...
...Xavier Godoy, a The inarticulate Pablo and a bartender: "What is the use of Tecanecan priest with revolutionary leanings...
...Naftali, a rich suicidal Indian...
...There it is, using its two-hour-plus runoutlook, Stone's thoughts on the role of America abroad are ning time to explore the refined sensibilities of lovers stifled notable neither for originality nor acuity, but only for his imag- by the rigorous social code of upper-class New York in the 1870s, inative possession of them...
...When your took him to Vietnam as a correspondent-another drug-filled American soldier fighting today drops a napalm bomb scene-and to Central America...
...It rary writer...
...of the author's work, Stone's early years make the childhood endured by Charles showing our readers where and how this writer loDickens appear almost normal...
...With Children Sister Justin: "Everyone, every mother and child on the coast of Light (1986), Stone did not succeed, at least was in his [Campos's] hands, living and dying through his suf- not completely...
...This work might well have been subtitled "Bringing Vietnam Home...
...Because of you...
...Embassy in Tecan and his wife Marie...
...example, draws heavily upon the days when he sold encyclo- Conjure with this lady and mestizos, zambos, Croats, and pedias in small towns across Louisiana and worked as a cen- all such persons simply disappear...
...to the phantasmagoric, apocalyptic scene that brings the story "Patriots, there is danger...
...The report also debunks earlier studies that erroneously suggested that members of the American media are irreligious...
...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...
...Integral to the novel is the problem posed to Converse and others by the U.S...
...Stone recalls this as a strange but not una most interesting case...
...A writing scholarship took tradition of those American writers who have attempted to define the contours and tap the pulse of this singular country...
...Taken together, these observations on the personal, the inner Holliwell: "Do you expect to conduct your career in one life, place in perspective the revolution, U.S...
...Bridging the Gap: Religion and the News Media This groundbreaking new report, based on a survey of nearly 900 clerg' and journalists, examines the alienation that exists between the religious community and the news media and makes recommendations for improvement...
...Listen to the nature of the to its near conclusion...
...best...
...in the affairs of Central America and, particularly, the was a challenge and a provocation to the likes of Holliwell...
...The realization made him even gloomier because he audience that believes him to be a highly regarded contempo- believed that such impulses were particular to him alone...
...This lady's innocence if fully unMany of these and other life experiences have found their leashed could defoliate every forest in the torrid zone...
...But what's in rooming houses and SROs (single room occupancy hotels) a writer's heaven for...
...one rooted largely in a search for facts and the other grounded in a discovery of faith beyond fact...
...After this list, it may believe there is a spiritual force...
...I ing, self-deception, and self-discernment...
...It was predatory...
...His previous novels open on a relativein his mortar-proof palace in the capital, the American inter- ly quiet note and entice the reader into the disquieting world 12: 5 November 1993 Commonweal that is then disclosed...
...Based on his experience in ferance...
...active participant in the new and heavy drug scene based on "The American way is innocence," Reinhardt anLSD and other "mind-expanding" drugs...
...Otherwise he's always been the showing Warlock II: The Armageddon, the John agent of someone else's agenda...
...These lines intersect, however, in scenes things, and acted in the world according to what they believed...
...As a consequence, Stone's esthetic intent is more nearly congruent with his moral vision...
...What is the use of me...
...Pablo broods about Deedee Third Man in which-because of a mix-up-an American Callahan: "What he wanted, he realized, was to fuck and to writer of Westerns is pressed to give a lecture in Vienna to an kill her...
...journalists fear making mistakes and incurring religious wrath...
...Americans," he resumed, "our shoulders are Stone traveled to Antarctica in 1958 and subsequent trips broad and sweaty but our breath is sweet...
...Satan is very powerful here...
...erable comic effect...
...Now, it's true that milieu must be defined by seriously questions that the culture has largely obviated...
...14.95 paper dents present him with the challenge to sail, single-handed, in a round-the-world race...
...Stone The narrative carries the reader from a low-keyed opening devoted five years to the writing of his first novel and says he to its highly charged, fever-pitched ending, the tenor of which put into it "everything I had experienced, felt, or suspected...
...Latins choke on colorful narrative, packed with close observation and multiple their arrogant smirks...
...This assertion is demonstra- Woo-Jean-Claude Van Damme killfest, Hard Tarbly false...
...13.95 paper The order of battle, the hamlet evaluation reports, the Rules of Engagement, were dreams...
...In context, "fulsome clouds" makes little sense...
...In others, the relationship seems so clear as to our series of articles be almost self-evident...
...the unstable, violent, sleazy addict "I can't answer your question...
...Children of Light immediately thrusts the reader into an uncongenial, druggy atmosphere, and the less Isle of the Saints he responds to it the less likely he is to become concerned about those who are at home in it, most particularly the addicted screen- Monastic Settlement and Christian Community writer and the schizophrenic actress around whom most of the in Early Ireland plot revolves...
...and disturbed by private discomforts...
...Faith, belief, and commitment are a revolution is brewing...
...ews Media Name: Affiliation: Address: City State: Zip: Mail to: Bridging the Gap, The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center 120"r 18th A%enue, South, Nash;iIIe, TA' 37212 C the novel lies in the skill with which Stone blends low life and ests that kept everything in place...
...Pious assholes...
...Occasionally they would fident writer whose self-assessments, never- travel to some place (New Mexico, Chicago) with the hope theless, sometimes seem off the mark...
...But the views he has expressed about this country, novelists whose next work a serious reader can anticipate with particularly in its foreign ventures, seem time-bound by the high and confident expectations...
...Hired to make a documentary based on the round-the-world race, he enlists the help of New in Paper...
...A Hall of Mirrors, for This lady is a whip to niggers...
...Children of Light, Ballantine, $1.95, 256 pp...
...Yet he muses: "Everyone must [feel these things] or the value of human life would decline...
...a mys- of de other...
...My dency toward godly musings and carryings on and let his comic fear was that Scorsese would justify the wide distribution all urge go where it will...
...11.95 paper plastic...
...purpose...
...It sums up a huge amount of work soon learn, however, that he is stirred by some "obscure guilt" done on Irish monasticism over the past fifty years...
...The skepticism "that led me out of religious belief also leads Didn't his hyperthyroid cinematics distance us from the setme out of secular complacency...
...He is an imposingly con- on Manhattan's Upper West Side...
...LISA M. BITEL With Outerbridge Reach (1992), Stone made a departure of sorts...
...policies in Central America that the characters work out their With these two novels Stone stamped his signature on his destinies...
...Stone's characters, their lives frequently reduced to a desperate and elemental level, are driven to cope with basic questions of existence...
...Again, a few quotations will threatening conflict: the missionaries, Father Egan, whose faith indicate how different characters express such awareness, even is moribund, and Sister Justin Feeney, who is nervously trou- if inchoately: bled but sympathetic to the revolution...
...With this handful of novels Stone has sixteen, saying goodbye to religion and all that...
...Heath...
...Murphy follow the fortunes of Browne on the water and of Strickland sets out to dispel skepticism regarding Christian belief...
...Every time she tells her little bleak days on this earth, walk unsteadily along the edge of the daughter that Jesus drank carbonated grape juice-then, abyss...
...Things had turned out strangely...
...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...
Vol. 120 • November 1993 • No. 19
