Home >  A & E >  Books

Abbreviated Robert Stone novel has no shortage of intrigue

Sunday, June 29, 2003

By Robert Peluso

Americans have always derived a special energy from their belief in a constitutional, if not a God-given, right to happiness. Yet, as one of the characters in Robert Stone's new novel observes, this same belief can hurl us into a dangerous funk if we fail to achieve our little piece of paradise. As Stone himself shows, it almost certainly will lead us into situations we are ill-equipped to handle.

	"Bay of Souls" By Robert Stone Houghton Mifflin ($25)

"Bay of Souls" opens with Michael Ahearn, a married, middle-aged professor, setting out on a routine hunting trip with colleagues. His companions may be hunting for deer, but, like a classic Stone hero, Ahearn is after different game. As he remarks a few pages into the book, his friends may consider bliss unattainable, but for him it "is still a possibility." This simple, sincere assumption pulls Ahearn into dangerous terrain.

Ahearn's chance at bliss comes when he meets a divorced, middle-aged professor of Caribbean studies named Lara Purcell. The relationship starts as a simple sexual encounter, but, bound by their mutual craving for transcendence, Ahearn and Purcell are drawn into stranger and stranger territory.

In a kind of self-consuming frenzy, the affair eventually turns into something altogether different when Purcell lures Ahearn to the island of St. Trinity, where she plans to reclaim her own soul in a vodoun (or voodoo) ceremony.

In this section of the novel, the straightforward world of everyday life slips away, and we are exposed to the raw currents beneath it. On the island, which is rife with political unrest and intrigue, Ahearn finds himself unwittingly drawn into both a smuggling operation and the vodoun ceremony. In a powerful series of scenes, he confronts the limits of desire and, almost by accident, manages to escape his own death, though he must leave Purcell behind.

Back in the States, Ahearn finds that his wife has taken up with one of his colleagues, and his preadolescent son has grown icily proper toward him. Whatever possibilities for bliss he viewed at the novel's opening have left him wandering like a ghost through his own life. "A man without a meaning was a paltry thing," he had mused toward the beginning of the story; by the end, he has become his own worst nightmare.

Nobody ever said it was pretty watching people's lives unravel, but Robert Stone has been one of our connoisseurs of the topic. There are exquisitely drawn scenes of marital discord, the silent devastation that takes place between couples who have lost touch with one another.

The driven, desperate eroticism of Ahearn and Purcell's encounters is strikingly rendered, as are those sequences on St. Trinity, where Ahearn scuba dives into a plane wreck and where he stumbles through the hallucinatory vodoun ceremony. These are some of the finest scenes you would be likely to encounter anywhere.

That said, this novel is strangely unrewarding. Possessed of a crisp style and distilled plotting, "Bay of Souls" both exhilarates and disappoints. That is, the problem with the novel is not the themes, which are important, or the characters, who are intriguing, or the plot, which is captivating, but with the strangely abbreviated treatment of these elements. In many ways, "Bay of Souls" feels like "Damascus Gate" on a crash diet.

As always, Stone dares to probe the territory of personal salvation -- the courage needed to find it and the consequences of not having what it takes -- with unflinching steadiness. Clearly, this kind of investigation requires an expansive canvas, certainly more than the 249 pages that this novel provides. In the end, "Bay of Souls" is a very good book that suffers not from bad writing or a weak story or uninteresting characters or a trivial theme, but from not enough Robert Stone.

Robert Peluso is a writer and teacher living in Pittsburgh.