Children of Light

By Robert Stone

By "one of the most impressive novelists of his generation" (The New York Review of Books), Children of Light is a searing, indelible love story of two ravaged spirits, played out under the merciless, magnifying prism of Hollywood.

Gordon Walker, screenwriter and actor, has systematically ruined his family and his health with cocaine and alcohol. Lee Verger is an actress of uncommon and unfulfilled promise, whom Gordon has known since the days when they were both young and fearless, and whose New Orleans childhood has left her with a tenuous hold on sanity. During the shooting of a film on the Pacific coast of Mexico, they resume a ritual struggle in which their desperate love for each other will either save or destroy them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307814173

Robert Stone

ROBERT STONE (1937–2015) was the acclaimed author of eight novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2007.

Reviews for Children of Light

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The alchemists sought to turn lead into gold, but Robert Stone did them one better: he turned lurid trash into real literature. At his best, Stone manages to make the misadventures of his sleazy, drug-soaked characters play like real tragedy. "Children of Light" is not Stone's best. His prose, which is often hard-bitten and elegant in equal measure, still sparkles in places, and he skillfully weaves strands of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" and Shakespeare's "King Lear" into a plot that describes the anguished final days of a fading film star. He also does a fine job of inhabiting a schizophrenic character, providing chillingly literal descriptions of the hallucinations that populate her inner life. What's missing from this novel, though, is any tension between idealism, however flimsy, and his characters' inevitable decline. In "Outerbridge Reach," Stone showed us the crack-up of a protagonist who was believed he possessed a great deal of moral fortitude; the characters in "Children of Light," on the other hand, are already scraping the bottom when the novel begins, and there's nothing for the reader to do but await their inevitable bad ends. Many of the characters in Stone's other novels come from respectable backgrounds and stumble into lives of crime. The panic they feel when they realize that they are in well over their heads is palpable, and important, I think, to Stone's success as a writer. By contrast, It's hardly surprising to learn that people in the film industry, where "Children of Light" is set, are emotionally shallow hedonists; a quick read through the "National Enquirer" will tell you as much. "Children of Light" is fascinating in the same way that car wrecks, or episodes of "True Hollywood Story" are, but not much in the novel takes the reader by surprise. Stone also navigates the border that separates serious literature from sensationalism less skilfully than usual. Both Stone and his characters make liberal use of film clichés, easily assuming and discarding a series of masks and shticks. Even so, Stone sometimes struggles to put enough space between his authorial voice and their Hollywood platitudes, particularly when they discuss their romantic entanglements at length. When his exhausted, far-gone characters discuss their affections, it's almost impossible to take them seriously, and, as a consequence, Stone's own writing begins to ring a little false. This problem is perhaps made worse by the fact that the coke-addled, post-hippie screenwriter at the center of the story reminds me a bit of Stone's own jacket photographs. Still, there's a lot in "Children of Light" that is vintage Stone: his fatalistic outlook often seems to emphasize how brilliantly vibrant his writing can be. With all of its shortcomings, this novel is still recommended to Mr. Stone's admirers.