Madison Smartt Bell captures every aspect of Stone’s contradictory nature, especially his work ethic ... One of the best sections of this praiseworthy biography is the account of a trip he took with Stone to Haiti, along with one of Stone’s mistresses, who had to nursemaid the novelist when it appeared that he might die while traveling to a voodoo ritual ... Yet sympathetic as he is to his subject, Bell never softens his focus or smooths over Stone’s less admirable traits ... Bell has a novelist’s gimlet eye for details, and the Stone archive offered him rich material. It revealed as much about the state of publishing in the 21st century as it did about Stone ... While I wish there had been more about Stone’s early life, the daughter he fathered outside his marriage and the sexual partners who clearly influenced his fiction, Bell does a laudable job of explicating Stone’s novels ... In the end, Child of Light leaves the reader with the urge to return to all of Robert Stone’s work—surely the best sign of a fine biography.
... revealing ... a sensitive and thorough biography. Bell knew Stone well toward the end of his life; the two traveled together in Haiti. The author explicates Stone’s fiction and expands its context. If this quite conventional biography never entirely takes off, it is rarely uninteresting ... Bell writes with special alertness about Stone’s marriage ... This is one of those rare biographies in which you don’t feel like skimming the first 35 pages.
...essential and much anticipated ... Bell’s tone throughout is so scrupulous and matter-of-fact, the pitch of emotion rarely rising much above a police report as he unfurls the great writer’s life—the childhood, the education, the navy years, the early publications, and so on ... In some ways, the even-keeled tone is as much an homage as the facts he has accumulated ... In some ways, Child of Light is as much a biography of a marriage as it is of a writer, and toward the end Stone’s books come to seem almost like collaborations with Janice, just as Bell’s biography is buttressed by her work as an archivist, interlocutor, and writer ... Bell gives us all the many pieces of Stone’s life and the composition of his writings, and some analysis, as well. It’s an illuminating appendix to a master’s body of work.
... [a] his masterly new biography ... He takes a deliberately flat, noncommittal approach to describing Stone’s addictions to alcohol and painkillers ... It’s a reconstruction, not deconstruction, of the life and works of this resolutely realistic author ... despite the tenuous position of acting as anyone’s Boswell, particularly a close friend, Bell reserves judgment. The result is a book that serves as an act of friendship, scholarship, and devotion.
Stone’s fiction is not uplifting and cheerful, nor does it make you feel better about yourself. It offers, instead, narratives of disillusion, in which we discover what we really are ... Bell knew and obviously loved Robert Stone. His lengthy and detailed biography,...views its subject with an offhand, tolerant affection. Stone is called 'Bob' all the way through, liquor is often referred to as 'grog,' and very little critical distance exists between the biographer and his subject.This devotion softens, slightly, the harrowing narrative of Stone’s early life ... No one can smoke, drink 'heroically' (Bell’s word for it), and do drugs with any regularity without some unwholesome systemic results, and the last third of this biography tells the inevitable story of Stone’s physical decline. It is not an account for the faint of heart ... One finishes Bell’s biography, which could almost have been titled Darkness and Laughter, with a renewed respect for its subject and a feeling of awe for the love he inspired in his biographer, wife, children, and friends.
Mr. Bell, in his role of biographer, proves as liable to presuppose his subject’s importance...as the writer himself was in pontifical exercises called things like 'What Fiction Is For,' while the freshly canonized novels, never at the cutting edge, too often seem slickly platitudinous and baldly conventional ... Mr. Bell also wants to present Stone as an 'artist'—the word and its cognates occur frequently in his account ... And yet [Stone's] prose never shows the slightest hint of strain or striving. We are confined to the realm of purely theoretical complexity, a land characterized by bland adjectives and banal syntax ... Mr. Bell’s desire to take Stone’s side on every matter...imputes dubious motives to Stone’s critics ... [Stone's] stories...feel raw and potent ... It’s an irony both regrettable and unmissable that the only services that Stone’s devoted friend and fan has neglected to render are those that might provide strongest support for the grand claims being made on his behalf.
In books that deserve to endure, Stone anticipates the present in surprising, unsettling ways ... compulsively readable but reliant almost exclusively on Stone and his wife as sources.
Bell’s approach seems formulaic after a time: He writes of a period of time, offers a sometimes-too-detailed summary of the plot of a given book or story, surveys the criticism (Michiko Kakutani being a special bête noire), and finally looks at the till. It’s a lot of inside baseball. Though perhaps too much for civilian readers, the business end in particular will fascinate working writers. For all Stone’s flaws, Bell makes a solid case for the importance of his work ... Perhaps not the last word on Stone but essential for students and fans of the writer’s works.
Biographer and novelist Bell...meticulously recounts the life of Robert Stone ... A friend of Stone and his wife, Janice, Bell draws extensively on conversations with both, but doesn’t allow that closeness to compromise his accounts of Stone’s personal struggles, including with drug addiction. However, an unnecessary level of detail (Bell even gives the names of the dying Stone’s physical therapists) distracts from the book’s focus on cementing Stone’s reputation. Nonetheless, Bell provides a solid biography of an important American novelist.
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