294
PEARL
K.
BEll
psychedelic days have clung to his novels. But this political undercurrent,
with its simple-minded judgments about American "imperialism," is not
what makes Stone such an original: after
all,
apocalyptic nightmare has
been summoned up in so many novels it has become as mechanical as the
Victorian happy ending. What sets Robert Stone apart from the other
chroniclers of demoralization and
anomie
is the brilliant intensity of his
prose, which combines the metaphorically ornate and the low-life collo–
quial with such supple ease, and his vibrant skill as a storyteller.
In his new novel,
Outerbridge Reach,
Stone is much less preoccupied
than he has previously been with personal breakdown and corruption as
cautionary images of public disintegration and the moral failings of
American life. For once his principal character is a solid citizen, square,
politically conservative, devoted to his wife and teen-age daughter. The
malaise that claws Owen Browne is a matter of private "rages and re–
grets," a vague feeling of "rebellion against things," not a disenchanted
indictment of the society at large. A graduate of the Naval Academy,
Browne has disquieting memories of his service in Vietnam, though
Stone does not linger over the war that was the diseased heart of
Dog
Soldiers.
When he left the Navy, Browne took an unsatisfying job writing
advertising brochures for a yacht builder in Connecticut, part of the
shaky financial empire of a flamboyant rogue entrepreneur who disap–
pears just as he is about to embark on a solo round-the-world race in
one of his company's sailboats. When Browne is offered his boss's place
in the race, he eagerly accepts even though he has had little experience of
solo sailing, and certainly none on a global scale. But despite his wife's
and his own foreboding about the risk he will be taking, the race seems
exactly the opportunity Browne has been hoping for, a way of shedding
the canker of paralysis and despair that has been gnawing at his soul, a
means of recapturing the heroic dreams of his youth.
No novel of Robert Stone's is without its figure of evil, and the
snake in
Outerbridge Reach
is a documentary film-maker, Ron Strickland,
hired by Browne's company to make a movie about the race. Strickland
leads us back into familiar Stone territory: a cynic without a shred of
conscience or moral vitality, vaguely left-wing but fundamentally
contemptuous of everything including politics. A ruthless womanizer, he
seduces Browne's wife Anne after her husband sails away, determined to
flout her idealistic pretensions and break through her mask of
respectability, and it's not long before she's sunk to his amoral level.
The narrative shuttles between sea and land, in chapters alternating
between Browne's mounting inability to control his boat, which after a
bad storm he realizes is a piece of junk, and Anne Browne's drunken
