Stephen Dau's The Book of Jonas is a marvelous, lyrical debut that examines the effects of war on everyone involved. Dau weaves together the stories...
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"Reading Robert Stone, I always feel I'm in the company of the smartest guy in the room. He rarely settles for the conventional wisdom or even the conventional sentence. His distinctive prose defies simple description: It's studded with literary allusions, some of them fairly obscure (la trahison des clercs, anyone?), but its blunt cadences reflect the down-to-earth sensibility of someone who declares... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) that 'the closer to street level you live, the more you have lessons thrust upon you.' Suffused with longings for transcendence, novels like 'A Flag for Sunrise' and 'Damascus Gate' are anchored in plainspoken acknowledgment of political reality. There aren't many authors who write about metaphysical matters with such passionate unpretentiousness. So it's no surprise to find that Stone's memoir of the 1960s views with unsentimental clarity a decade that has been the subject of more overheated rhetoric than any other in U.S. history. That's no small feat, since Stone's adventures in the counterculture have assumed mythic proportions: He dropped acid with Richard Alpert! He smoked dope in Mexico with Ken Kesey! He was on the bus with the Merry Pranksters! He was in Vietnam! These myths are founded on fact, though Stone's sojourn in Vietnam consisted of a few months in 1971 as a very freelance journalist, and he didn't actually ride cross-country with the Pranksters. (It was his Manhattan apartment the bus pulled up in front of at the end of their journey: How hip is that?) And 'Prime Green' is as much the chronicle of a literary apprenticeship as it is the drama of a generation's pursuit of ecstasy. Indeed, like Kesey, Stone was a bit older than the baby boomers who made up the majority of the "60s shock troops, which gives him a slightly different perspective. In 1958, when his narrative begins, he was a 20-year-old sailor near the end of a hitch in the Navy that started before he was 18. Two years later, he was a married man with a baby on the way. Atmospheric descriptions of New York and New Orleans in the poverty-stricken early years of his marriage portray societies still dominated by pre-World War II customs and attitudes. (During a gig as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman on the Gulf Coast, Stone was arrested on suspicion of being a civil rights agitator.) The book's most moving passage shows the author rejecting the temptation to run off with a traveling theater company and abandon his pregnant wife, Janice. Despite his conviction that 'I was too young to be tied down ... a world of adventures awaited,' he writes. 'At that moment I knew that I was not going anywhere. I loved her and that was fate.' These are not the words of a feckless bohemian, and though Stone jokingly claims that his decision revealed him to be 'just another daddy Dagwood bourgeois jerk,' in fact he left New Orleans with the germ of an idea for his first novel, 'A Hall of Mirrors.' He was enough of a bourgeois jerk to embark on a 'deliciously illicit' affair shortly after he arrived in San Francisco with his wife and daughter to take up a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford in 1962. However, he notes, 'illicitness was not going to be around much longer. ... We were about to abolish the very notion.' That's not a particularly startling insight about the nascent counterculture he connected with in Northern California, but the metaphysical tone (recalling earlier rebels such as the Russian nihilists) is characteristic of Stone. More surprising are several very funny passages, including a hilarious conversation among the author, Janice and a friend, all completely hammered on peyote, and an amusing reference to removing the seeds from marijuana as a 'homely craft (that) has gone the way of great-grandma's butter churn.' Stone's fiction doesn't entirely lack humor, but that's certainly not its leading quality. By contrast, 'Prime Green' is often extremely witty. There are a few standard "60s moments here, from a bearded, scruffily clad Stone getting beaten up by truckers to a distasteful party at which he and Janice and the other wasted parents let their kids take whiffs of nitrous oxide from balloons that turned out to be condoms. The author also provides a loving portrait of Kesey and a generous assessment of his friend's failure to match the early success of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' It was at Kesey's home in Mexico that Stone savored the dawns that give the book its title: 'The slopes and valleys of the rain forest would explode in green light, erupting inside a silence that seemed barely to contain it.' It's a lovely scene, rapt with a romantic sense of wonder akin to that of Stone's favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But it's no more revelatory of the author's character than a riff in the middle of Stone's sardonic account of his stint as a hack writer for a sleazy New York tabloid. Pausing to reflect on what he learned there, 'beyond the depths of vulgarity of which I was capable,' he writes: 'Certain laws obtain in all fictive enterprises, low journalism included. They are almost moral laws ... I have come to believe that language, a line of print, say, is capable of inhabiting the imagination far more intensely than any picture, however doctored. ... Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect.' In those words, we glimpse the man who would soon write 'Dog Soldiers,' the artist for whom, however enthusiastically he participated in the excesses of the 1960s, 'writing was just about all there was.'" Reviewed by Wendy Smith, author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940", Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 462-465) and index.
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