Gerard Piloquiet

This is one of my favorite novels of any kind. It brings together everything I like about Robert Stone: characters with great potential and terrible flaws, a variety of approaches to love, a strong feeling for place and for different kinds of work, physical danger described in unusual poetic terms while still being frightening, very dark humor and gorgeous prose. It feels grounded and whole in a way that his books don't always achieve, even though he's deliberately writing against his grain, giving two-thirds of the stage not to the wandering bohemian journalist character but to mainstream suburban New York Republicans. And despite being about people who don't know what they're doing, it's plotted like a graceful machine-- every step of the setup seems like a simple detail at the time, and then once the story gets going, those details align into something that feels inevitable.

The central event, a solo sailing race around the world, is sort of based on a real incident which would have made a good story by itself, but Stone uses very little of that story except for one particular infamously bad decision. The rest of it is perfectly constructed to examine how someone could make that decision, to imagine how the seeds of it might have been planted by interactions with other people without their awareness, and to relate it to the choices we make in less dramatic circumstances. Even though the characters are sometimes lost in introspection, the setting and the action are always very specific: this is how this or that person handles a boat, attends a convention, films an interview. The guy in the boat isn't just an abstract man facing nature and facing himself; his situation is influenced by his family and community and job, and even when he's alone it's a modern kind of solitude where you can make phone calls-- and that thread of contact affects the course of the story in a way that wouldn't have been possible in an earlier time and, for different reasons, wouldn't be possible now.

If you've ever read anything by this author, it's not really giving anything away to say that by the end of this book some extremely sad things have happened. The last page always kills me and makes me weepy; it's an ambiguous and in some ways hopeful ending, but it's not the kind of hope you would have hoped for. It's all worth it, though.… (more)

Robert Stone is a really great writer. To expand on that sentiment a little bit, I'll say that Robert Stone is a really great masculine writer. In an age when it seems that any Cormac-come-lately who writes short, simple sentences can be acclaimed as the next Hemingway, Robert Stone shows us how masculine writing, with male protagonists, masculine themes, and, yes, masculine prose, is done. His sentences aren't obviously reductive or overbearing; they're forceful and direct, carefully wrought and precision-tuned for maximum impact. The influence of thriller-genre writing on Stone's plots and characters is obvious, but this genre's favorite virtues extend to his prose. Stone has mostly forgone the genre's pulpiest diction, but his sentences are still lithe and taut and wonderfully propulsive, pushing the reader forward without bothering to show off their often flawless craftsmanship. I'll stop short of flattery, but I'm pretty sure that Stone could make an auto manual compelling reading if he decided to make that his next project.

"Outerbridge Reach" itself has a lot to recommend it, though many of its themes will surely be familiar to Stone's readers. This time, Stone tackles the social and emotional fallout of the sixties from a different perspective, making Owen Browne, a conservative former Navy officer, his narrator. Suffering from financial trouble and emotional isolation, Browne decides to stake his life and financial fortunes on a solo round-the-world sailboat race with predictably disastrous, if unexpectedly bizarre, results. Stone, who is better known for creating louche, dangerously unprincipled characters like Ron Strickland, a filmmaker who chronicles Browne's adventure, writes Browne without condescension, making him both likable and flawed. As the story progresses and the plot enters the long, slow death spiral that seems characteristic of his novels, he mercilessly exposes the cracks in Browne's character, and it's riveting, if almost painful, to see Browne quail before both the elements and the impossibly high standards he has set for himself. The book's structure, which hinges on the dual conflicts of "man versus nature" and "man versus himself," might be familiar to readers who spend a lot of time at sea, as will the plot itself, which is a reworking of the Donald Crowhurst scandal of the mid-sixties. Still, it's thrilling to see both sides of this equation handled this well by a writer of Stone's caliber. The comparisons that Stone draws, between Browne's experience and that of his entire generation, or between the different kinds of toughness exhibited by the novel's characters, fit seamlessly with the book's seagoing plot. Among all this testosterone, Stone even manages to include Anne Browne, a complex, sympathetic female character who bridges the gap between Stone's two preferred character archetypes. The daughter of a wealthy shipping family, she begins the book a respectable WASPy woman of middle age but slips slowly and inexorably into alcohol and adultery as the novel progresses. For all his style and manly bravado, Stone's principal interest is human frailty. In "Outerbridge Reach," every character, and every sailing vessel, is stretched well past their breaking point and few emerge better for their experience. It's a compelling and impressive read, but sometimes so intense that it's likely to leave some of Stone's audience feeling tempest-tos't and thoroughly exhausted.… (more)