Bay of Souls by Robert Stone
Garvey, John
SCARY STUFF Bay of Souls Robert Stone Houghton Mifflin, $25,249 pp. John Garvey M ichael Ahearn, the protagonist of Robert Stone's latest novel, is a professor at a state university in the...
...I know religion isn't consoling in Greene...
...This is not Stone's best novel, but anything he does is more worth reading than most of what we get...
...Stone may not yet be in their league, but he is close enough to it for me to keep reading anything he does...
...As someone said when we were discussing our shared admiration for this novel, you could say that Moby-Dick and Faulkner's The Bear are both about animals as metaphors well, yes...
...Ahearn hasn't prayed for his son "You did not pray for things...
...Although Bay of Souls is definitely not a comic novel, there are some good and funny lines here, and the shift toward tighter writing may mean that the Alaska novel is close at hand...
...She is a native of a Haitilike island, Saint Trinity, and is returning there for a voodoolike memorial rite for her brother, who died of AIDS and who, she believes, has given her soul away to Marinette, a sinister deity in the island religion...
...Some really good writers care about a relatively small range of things...
...But now his son's life was saved...
...I will not give the details, because there is a special circle in hell for reviewers who spoil things for the reader by telling too much...
...it may be terrifying...
...Flannery O'Connor didn't sprawl in her field of concerns, nor does William Trevor...
...it's enough to say that the encounter is echoed later in the novel, in a spookily effective way...
...Here Stone does something tricky and gets away with it...
...John Garvey is an Orthodox priest and a columnist for Commonweal.ist for Commonweal...
...Not always...
...Pale and shivering, dulleyed as a snake digesting a rat, she contained the whole awful business...
...Stone makes some mistakes: one is aesthetic, an embarrassing sadomasochistic sex scene that makes Lara's alleged allure even more puzzling, and another factual, a scene at Mass that makes it clear Stone hasn't been there in a while, unless there is a Catholic church that still has the old prayers at the foot of the altar in English, with the priest and server facing the same way as the congregation...
...John Garvey M ichael Ahearn, the protagonist of Robert Stone's latest novel, is a professor at a state university in the Midwest...
...Michael and Kristen Ahearn "had been raised in religion and they were warily trying it on again as parents...
...I think Stone is better at the religious and, often, stylistic levels...
...Gaffes and all, Stone pulls you into the story as a great storyteller does, and the writing at its best is sharp and strange: "Kristin absorbed her son's return from the dead as though it were her medicine...
...it is merely resigned to and weary and, except in his greatest work Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory a kind of prop...
...He is happily, if somewhat complacently, married and loves his young son Paul fiercely...
...Stone's men are more interesting than his women...
...That is Stone's strange moral, and it is articulated in a way that is always haunting, always worth attending, whatever he does...
...It is his shortest novel to date, and as exciting as the others have been, more like a thriller deliberately so, I think, both in its brevity and in the elements that pile on in the plot...
...That is theirs," Sister Margaret said after a moment...
...Lara is speaking to a nun, a teacher of Saint Trinity's children, about the religion believed in by so many of the islanders: "Do you believe in les mysteres...
...Then, as Ahearn ends the hunting trip, Kristin calls to say that Paul is missing, Ahearn returns to find Kristen and Paul in the hospital...
...And the great thing had come of nothing, of absolutely nothing, out of a kaleidoscope, out of a Cracker Jack box...
...He makes the sacred as scary as it should be...
...It glowed through her, stretching her translucent skin like a frame...
...He has been compared to Graham Greene...
...Some reviewers have objected that a lot of typical Stone themes recur here: there is a harrowing dive scene (a variation on scenes done in other novels), there are moments of hallucinatory intensity, and there is the fascination with religion...
...In Stone's novels, it could kill you...
...It may be hard to think of a writer who deals so artfully with darkness delivering a humorous novel, but in fact there are many very funny things in every Stone novel...
...Ahearn is on a hunting trip with friends when he has a disturbing encounter with another hunter...
...Humor asks for this kind of tightness...
...He sees his son's living instead of dying as something random, a sign that nothing really watches over us...
...In the meantime there is the constant Stone obsession, a worthy one...
...Concision is part of the art of humor...
...In this novel Lara, who is supposed to be alluring, does not come across as solidly as Kristin...
...one hilarious moment at the start of Stone's grimmest novel, A Flag for Sunrise, comes to mind...
...She hopes to recover her soul during the rite, and gets Ahearn to join her on the trip, during which, at Lara's behest, he also dives for treasure lost in a drug smuggler's plane wreck...
...An encounter with the truly sacred is not only not necessarily consoling...
...Everything leads to light...
...Paul begins to move toward a complete recovery, and Ahearn goes to the hospital chapel...
...A more sentimental novelist might have used a child's nearmiraculous recovery to bring a character to deeper faith and sense of gratitude, but Paul's recovery leads Ahearn to lose his already tentative faith...
...If that is his next project, the relative brevity of Bay of Souls is interesting...
...In the darkness, for them to find their way...
...Political intrigue, threats from dangerous drug dealers, a rite that passes like a nightmarish hallucination, and a return to what passes for real life all follow...
...Almost...
...but don't they do it well...
...From darkness, almost...
...A distance grows between Ahearn and his wife, and he is drawn into an affair with Lara Purcell, a colleague at the university with a shadowy political past involving both left and rightwing politics...
...They are left over from Creation...
...In a recent radio interview, Stone said that he wants to write a comic novel set in Alaska...
...Are they wickedness...
...Prayer, like Franklin's key on a kite, attracted the lightning, burned out your mind and your soul...
...This may be a transitional work...
...Not wickedness," the nun said...
...His wife broke her leg in rescuing Paul from the snow, and Paul is near death from hypothermia...
...The criticism that Stone returns too frequently to the same obsessions, even to somewhat similar ways of displaying them, misses an important point...
Vol. 130 • September 2003 • No. 16
