“There must in art, as in medicine and fashion,” wrote Proust, “be new names.” Robert Stone, the novelist, is such a new name. Not that Stone is quite so new as all that: he published A Hall of Mirrors, the first of his three novels, in the middle 1960’s. But Stone’s is a new name in the Proustian sense—in the sense that his reputation is in the ascendant. When lists of leading American novelists are brought out, he will henceforth be on them.

Who composes these lists? Nothing so interesting as a conspiracy exists. Certain telltale signs of elevation, though, do appear. Respectful reviews crop up in respectable places. Interviews are printed in which the coming man speaks of his work habits, then, portentously, of the contemporary condition. Blurb-masters sharpen their pencils. “Stone writes like a bird, like an angel, like a circus barker, like a con man, like someone so high on pot that he is scraping his shoes on stars,” says Wallace Stegner, with the hollow exaltation that only one practiced in the blurby craft can command. Then there is the public changing of the guard: how ludicrous, notes the critic Richard Poirier in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to regard Mailer, Bellow, Styron, Roth, and Updike as our leading novelists, “given the presence of writers more powerful than all of them—except possibly Mailer—such as Thomas Pynchon and Robert Stone.”

There is no shortage of reasons why the guard must change, why there must be new names. One is that the older guard is no longer felt to be good enough or interesting enough; what once seemed bright ideas soon come to seem rather haggard obsessions. Another reason is that the world hungers for new novelists out of as great an interest in novelty as in novels. Time and Newsweek do roughly two literary covers annually; the New York Times does four or five profiles of living writers, and they have already gone as far down as Joseph Heller, Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving. Fresh faces must be found.

Being photogenic is not the first consideration. Being a member of the right club can be, though, and sometimes this club is called Feminist, sometimes Jewish, sometimes Black. Novelists, like ethnic restaurants, can come to renown for the delicacies their works promise. Politics is frequently a consideration, as when a writer speaks to the issues, problems, questions of the moment in a way that critics and readers wish to hear them spoken of. And sometimes, finally, a novelist is brought forth for that oddest of all reasons—because he is very good at writing novels.

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With A Flag for Sunrise,¹ his most recent novel, there is no doubt that Robert Stone has arrived. But where, in this rather elaborate scheme, does he fall? By his own account, Robert Stone was born into a working-class family, of Scottish Presbyterian and Irish Catholic parents. He is a high-school dropout, a man who writes quite as much out of actual as out of bookish experience. Stone has been in the Navy and in the Merchant Marine; he has put in his days among Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and other of the founding fathers of the drug and counterculture; later, as a civilian, he went to Vietnam on a journalist’s visa. He knows wide stretches of America: the South, California, New York. He has lived abroad. Writing his novels, as it would seem, out of direct observation and instinct, Stone comports well with the old-fashioned idea of the novelist as primarily a man of wide experience. With his wispy hair, fullish beard, bulbous nose, he is even beginning a little to resemble Tolstoy.

It was Tolstoy who once said that sad people who do not know what they want in life should not write novels. Sad Stone is. No novelist today writes novels so unrelievedly bleak. Although there are flashes of wit in Stone’s novels, each is in its own special way a dark book, the product of a dark imagination. Murder, madness, mayhem are the closing notes of his novels. Death when it comes is violent; torture is frequent; women, to put it gently, do not fare well. When one concludes a Robert Stone novel one knows one has been on a rough ride. One knows, too, that one has been reading a novelist of the highest ambition. In each of his three novels Stone has attempted a major statement: about the way we live, about America, about Man with a capital M.

One of the things people have always asked of novelists is that they know something the rest of us do not. By this I mean not only secrets of the heart, but information in a more specific sense. Be his book about a vicarage or a battleship, the novelist ought to know a setting, a kind of person, a corner of experience that comes as news to the rest of us. This news Stone supplies. His novels have to do with life in the netherworld—not the criminal underworld, though he touches on that too—the world of spiritually and sometimes physically broken human beings. “I got lost,” says one of the characters in A Hall of Mirrors, and this might be said of almost every character in Stone’s novels, from his sad Southern girls living on their wits to his washout priests to his pill-crazed sailors. Life has placed these characters in extremis; they live on the margin, friendless and miserable, out on the edge where life is dangerous and where one works without a net.

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The world in which Stone’s characters live out their days is utterly without tenderness of any kind. “If somebody ever tells you, Geraldine, that they need you,” one character in A Hall of Mirrors says to another, “you tell them to buy a dog.” Along with the high intake of pills and booze—in one way or another the majority of Stone’s characters are hooked on one thing or another—the level of violence in this world is very high, and terror and fear are everywhere. A sailor hunting on speed blows his favorite hunting dogs apart with a shotgun; a young woman has her face pried open by an oyster knife; a girl’s body shows up in a freezer; a madman is off on a child-killing spree; a nun is tortured and finally killed by a policeman using an electric cattle-prod. Whether his scene be Central America or New Orleans, Vietnam or Los Angeles, Stone makes of violence an elemental part of life, omnipresent and unavoidable.

None of this would be of great interest if Stone did not write so well about it. His prose has what Marianne Moore once called fiber: it is strong and flexible. He does landscapes and cityscapes with great artistry. He has keen ventriloquial qualities, and can speak out of the mouths and minds of a vast range of characters, from the lowly damaged to the highly cultivated. He has the novelist’s gift of sympathetic imagination, especially for the down and out—something rather rare today among American novelists, so many of whom reserve their sympathy for the characters in their novels who are so clearly themselves. And he can persuasively describe the world for us as it is seen through a drug-induced perspective, as in this passage from his second novel, Dog Soldiers:

Hicks drove on speed. His fatigue hung the desert grass with hallucinatory blossoms, filled ravines with luminous coral and phantoms. The land was flat and the roads dead straight; at night, headlights swung for hours in space, steady as a landfall—and then rushed past in streaks of color, explosions of engine roar and hot wind. Every passing truck left in its screaming wake the specter of a desert head-on—mammoth tires spinning in the air, dead truck drivers burning in ditches until dawn.

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Taken collectively, Stone’s novels show a clear line of development while working and reworking certain set patterns. In each of his three novels there is a character who survives, but whose survival marks him as a failure, for in these novels the brave are plowed under and only the uncourageous survive. All three novels have characters who can be described as hungry for justice, an appetite that Stone’s survivors initially view with the greatest skepticism, not to say cynicism. In all three novels, too, the female characters are made to pay a frightful price for their entanglement in politics, crime, revolution. The narrative shape of Stone’s novels is also similar from book to book: there is a rather careful setting up of scene and moral climate; a decision is made that triggers off a great rush of action; everyone is brought onto the page for a finale of devastation and death; and then each novel in its turn closes on an ironically bitter coda.

I have not yet said what Robert Stone’s novels are about. A Hall of Mirrors (1967) is set in New Orleans against a background of racial tumult. Dog Soldiers (1975) is set briefly in Saigon, more lengthily in California, and it has to do with drugs and the bizarreries of the counterculture. A Flag for Sunrise (1981) is set in an imaginary Central American country, the scene of revolution and counter-revolution. The South in the 60’s, Saigon and California in the early 70’s, the Third World today—over his career as a novelist Stone has had a sharp sense of where the action is. And that action for him is inevitably political.

In his first novel Stone set out what has remained his subject. At a redneck rally in New Orleans, Rheinhardt, the book’s hero (or anti-hero, as such characters were called then), who earns his living working for a right-wing radio station, announces what will be the theme of all Robert Stone’s books:

“The American Way is innocence,” Rheinhardt announced. “In all situations we must and shall display an innocence so vast and awesome that the entire world will be reduced by it. American innocence shall rise in mighty clouds of vapor to the scent of heaven and confound the nations!”

When he makes this statement Rheinhardt’s brain is floating in booze, mists of marijuana cloud his mind, but there is no question that he here speaks for his creator. This passage is an essential one in Robert Stone’s work; from it much else follows.

The theme of innocence is announced in the very title of Stone’s newest novel. “Everybody’s after a new morning,” Stone has said about it. “What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow. That is the meaning of the title.” For its greater part the book is set in a Central American country called Tecan—“representative,” Stone has said in an interview, “of all those places in the world, particularly in Latin America, that are beset by the American presence and that are ill-governed.” It is a country run by police bullies, ruled by a slightly mad dictator, and in thrall to North American interests. There is talk of turning the coastal part of Tecan into a resort paradise, which will bring many a jackpot to selected individuals, and nothing at all to the poor, which is to say nearly the entire population. It is a country lush with vegetation and ripe for revolution. It is one of those places, as a character in the novel describes them, “far from God, a few hours from Miami.”

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The organization of A Flag for Sunrise is episodic. The story is told through the thoughts of its four major characters: a priest named Father Egan, who runs a mission in the backwaters of itself backwater Tecan; Sister Justin, his assistant, a young American nun whose beauty is exceeded only by her moral earnestness; Frank Holliwell, an anthropologist who has helped the CIA in Vietnam, who is lecturing in the neighboring country of Compostela, and who is one of Stone’s world-weary skeptics; and Pablo Tabor, a half-breed American, a Coast Guard deserter who spends his life high on pills and bristling with paranoia. A wide supporting cast includes CIA operatives, Third World priests, sadistic policemen, cold-blooded revolutionaries, gunrunners, and a Jewish fence of international reputation. The action of the book tends toward revolution. As generally happens in episodically told novels, through the labyrinth of cause and effect events inevitably draw the major characters together at the close. The novel has an element of the thriller to it, but thrills alone are not what Stone is after.

Terror arrives at the outset. In the novel’s first episode Father Egan is scribbling away at a book that has been years in the writing—a book the Church is certain to reject but which is needed, he thinks, by “the masses so hungry for comfort in a violently dying world”—when he is interrupted by Lieutenant Campos, of the Guardia National, who has come to fetch him. The lieutenant wishes to make a confession: he has murdered a young girl, an American hippie, whose body he has preserved in the freezer in his residence. He also wants Father Egan to dispose of the body for him, and with appropriate Church ritual. “‘I am not an animal,” Campos said. ‘I believe there is a spiritual force. I believe in life after death.’” Campos is drunk at the time, but drunk or sober Father Egan knows himself to be up against a force brutal, barbarous, perverse. He is quite rightly terrified. Oughtn’t he to report the murder to the authorities? But in Tecan Lieutenant Campos is the authorities.

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This murder is not at the center of the novel, but it is meant to be illustrative of the sort of thing that goes on in Tecan, where people in power get away with murder. Scarcely is it any wonder that Frank Holliwell, when asked by the CIA to slip into Tecan to inquire about the activities of Father Egan and his assistant Sister Justin at the behest of the Tecan government, which suspects them of subversive activities—scarcely is it any wonder that Holliwell refuses to set foot in the country. Holliwell is, as other Stone heroes tend to be, “without beliefs, without hope—either for himself or for the world. Almost without friends, certainly without allies. Alone.”

Sister Justin is in Tecan for reasons of conscience. She is a veteran of the civil-rights days, has been in a Mississippi jail. She runs the dispensary at the mission. But there is so little to do there that the mission has been ordered to close down. “I think you’re very intelligent and moral and all good nunnish things,” Father Egan tells Sister Justin. “You had an attack of self-righteousness and you decided to try the impossible.” To imagine Sister Justin one might try to imagine an ideal reader of the old Ramparts, or of Mother Jones. She is someone who has not only bought the whole-earth catalogue of left-wing notions but is ready to die for them. Sister Justin is not prepared to leave Tecan, in fact, because she has signed on to aid, in any way she can, the revolution now in the works in that dark country.

As for Pablo Tabor, he is not someone who chooses to be in or out of Tecan. He is one of life’s drifters, though he cannot drift very far without pills of one kind or another. Life and pills make Pablo paranoid. He is always worried, as he puts it, about being “turned around.” His is an explosive paranoia. Death and disaster are his companions. He ties up with a gang of gunrunners who plan to supply the revolutionaries in Tecan. These plans go badly askew. Murder intervenes. Through a complicated concatenation of events, Pablo shores up in Tecan.

Well, to make a long novel short, Stone, through convincing enough artifice, pulls the strands of this ambitious work together. The parts mesh and fold and weave in and out. Many nice touches crop up along the way: interesting observations, deft descriptions, apt throwaway lines. Characters appear—the international fence Naftali among them—about whom one would have liked to learn more. Even though the novel goes soft in the middle and one begins to wish it were shorter, it is difficult not to be impressed with Stone’s skills, the fecundity of his invention. Precisely for that reason one regrets all the more that A Flag for Sunrise is such a botch, such a sad and misguided failure.

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The novel is rigged. Of course all novels are rigged, in the fundamental sense that they are artificial constructions, whose business it is, as it is the business of all literature, to turn facts into ideas. But Robert Stone works the other way round. For ideas he finds facts. He is imprisoned by his assumptions, and for a novelist few things can be more deadly. Reviewers have suggested that this novel of Stone’s is Conradian, but it was Conrad who, in Nostromo, wrote: “The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with the defense of prejudices, has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance, and compassion.”

What are Stone’s assumptions? He is still out to prove that “the American Way is innocence,” and that “American innocence shall rise in mighty clouds of vapors to the scent of heaven and confound the nations!” Only those lines, first written in 1967 in A Hall of Mirrors, must now be altered, for in Stone’s view American innocence has become a source of devastation, and the nations are now not so much confounded as destroyed by it. “Nothing is free,” Stone has remarked in an interview, “and we’ve been getting our bananas, so to speak. . . . We’ve been sending in marines and pushing people around in Central America, and we’re going to eventually have to pay the price for it.”

A novelist is entitled to his opinions, but in his novels he has to earn them by demonstration, by convincing narrative. In the early pages of A Flag for Sunrise, it looks as if Stone will earnestly attempt this demonstration when, at lunch with a CIA man, Frank Holliwell is told, “Well, it’s them or us, chum. Like always. They make absolute claims, we make relative ones. That’s why our side is better in the end.” It is a point to which Holliwell would seem, tacitly, to accede. But at the first opportunity, while lecturing in a country friendly to the United States called Compostela (compost, kids, get it?), he delivers a drunken talk about the thinness of American culture, the American worship of money—the standard stuff. “I think what is best about my country is not exportable,” remarks Holliwell later in the novel. “What is best about America doesn’t export,” said Stone in his interview. But what either of them means by this cannot be known, for not a hint of a whiff of a shred of a trace of a clue about what is best about America has ever showed up in a Robert Stone novel.

Perhaps one day it will, but for now Robert Stone’s view is roughly that of Sister Justin, who, thinking of the torturer and killer Lieutenant Campos, asks: “But was it not all of a piece—Campos on the coast, the President in his mortar-proof palace in the capital, the American interests that kept everything in place?” It is the standard view. It is a view which, brought to the writing of novels, gives us handsome young rebel priests and stout-hearted old revolutionaries without a glimpse of what Conrad, writing about revolutionaries, once called “the sinister impulses which lurk in . . . noble illusions.” It is, in short, the view that comes with a one-year subscription to the Nation.

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Can a novelist, even one with the most glittering gifts, command our attention when his ideas come to little more than the conventional wisdom? I doubt it, and Robert Stone would seem to doubt it, too. In a number of places in A Flag for Sunrise he attempts to deepen his subject, to cast out in deeper waters. Specifically, he wishes to invoke a vision larger than mere politics, a vision of cosmic evil. “There’s always a place for God,” says Holliwell during the question session after his drunken talk. “There is some question as to whether He’s in it.” Later in the novel, in Tecan, Holliwell goes diving and, deep down along a sheer coral wall, terrors stuns him. “Then Holliwell thought: It’s out there. Fear overcame him; a chemical taste, a cold stone on the heart.” What does Holliwell sense? “The thing out there must be feeling him, he thought, sensing the lateral vibrations of his climb, its dim primal brain registering disorder in his motion and making the calculation. Fear. Prey.”

Is it a shark? It it pure evil? Is it the death of American innocence? We are never told. Ambiguity is sometimes the mark of the highest poetry, but ambiguity fails here. Although metaphysical evil is a subject that comes up frequently in this novel for discussion, the problem is that it is just that—discussion. It is what Melville would have called “matter for psychologic theologians,” and what Rheinhardt, from Stone’s first novel, would have called “rebop,” the jazz musicians’ word for bull. Stone closes out this novel not just by implicating America in this metaphysical evil but by saying that America has been assigned to convey metaphysical evil to the world. Double rebop.

Unfortunately, Stone has convinced himself that he has a vision when all he really seems to have is a political point of view plated over with a thin layer of metaphysics. Richly endowed with literary gifts, he has chosen to offer them up on the altar of politics. What a sad demonstration of Karl Kraus’s bitter aphorism, the one that runs: “Today’s literature is prescriptions written by patients.”

¹ Knopf, 439 pp., $13.95.