Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone

Biographer and novelist Bell (Freedom’s Gate) meticulously recounts the life of Robert Stone (1937–2015), whose novels “chronicled the peak and the decline of a great many aspects of U.S. world dominance” through troubled, sometimes autobiographical characters. Raised in New York City, Stone spent much of his childhood in a school run by the Marist Brothers religious order while his schizophrenic mother—Stone never knew his father—was institutionalized. Though he lost his faith, this exposure to Catholicism shaped both his worldview and work. A Navy stint initiated a lifelong penchant for travel to often-fraught locales, including Saigon and Jerusalem, which informed his books. His first novel, 1967’s A Hall of Mirrors, a dark portrait of demagoguery in New Orleans, was an instant success. His second, 1974’s Dog Soldiers, about heroin smuggling during the Vietnam War, won the National Book Award. 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. (Mar.)