Children of Light [Paperback]

Robert Stone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 1999

Abandoned by his wife, Gordon needs something more - love. Love in the shape of Lu Anne. Following her to Mexico where she is filming a movie he's scripted, it doesn't matter to Gordon that Lu Anne is fighting for survival too, and that Gordon may push her over the edge.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Before he is fully awake, Gordon Walker, intellectual manque, failed playwright in his 40s and modestly successful screenwriter-actor, has already consumed his daily hits of valium, alcohol and cocaine. "Stoned, abandoned, desolate," he is a melancholy case, teetering at the edge of the precipice; his wife has fled, his children are estranged, he feels desperately alone. Bereft, he goes to Mexico, where his old love Les Verger, a gifted actress who is herself in thrall to dope, drink and episodic madness, is shooting a picture Walker wrote. From the beginning, the air is filled with portent. Their meeting is delayed, and with each intervening event, the tension and sense of impending doom mount. When they do meet, they will be left to the mercies of their flayed nerves and their inner ruin. The tale is swiftly and expertly told; the momentum is headlong, swirling; the talk stunning, spinning out of its energies and one crackling scene after another. There can be no mistaking that this is the work of a formidably gifted writer. 40,000 first printing; BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Adrift since his wife left him, tasting "death and ruin," screenwriter Gordon Walker needs "a little something to get by on" beyond alcohol and cocaine; so he seeks out his old lover LuAnne, an actress on location in Mexico where she's filming Walker's script of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. A "true" artist who works "without a net," schizophrenic LuAnne is on the verge of a breakdown. Walker survives their explosive reunion and saves himself, but LuAnne acts out her carefully fore shadowed fate. Moviemakingimages of dark and light, illusion and inven tionis the metaphorical frame for this intense, symbolic novel that dramatizes a moral vision of violence and evil in a world where "Things don't work out . . . . They just be. Powerful fic tion by the author of Dog Soldiers , which won the National Book Award in 1975. Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Picador (February 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330372246
• ISBN-13: 978-0330372244
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,241,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBERT STONE is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars stunningly bleak vision of the human condition, November 17, 1999

By 

Louisianian (Lake Charles, LA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Children of Light (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)

This novel is my favorite of all of Stone's disturbing and powerful works (I haven't read "Outerbridge Reach" yet). It's so beautifully and evocatively written that I somehow find the roll of the prose soothing and pleasurable, despite the all but unbearable sadness and desperation of the characters. I still, after several rereadings, find myself puzzled and disturbed that these characters can't get their acts together, act so selfishly, have so little self-control and respect for one another--just like people in real life, unfortunately. (Certainly in Stone's view, and I suppose also in mine). Drugs, booze, insanity, and cruelty abound, and are not punished. As the unforgettable conclusion reveals, there is ultimately no justice for these characters--they either survive or they don't. This is Stone's harshly beautiful world at its best, in my opinion.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Love at first sight, February 10, 2000

By 

Mark Sullivan (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Children of Light (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)

This was the first book by Robert Stone I read. Damscus Gate was the second, though I prefer Children of Light.

Stone's mind, his craft as a writer and a narrator, drew me into the story from the outset. In spite of the bleak, unrelenting theme, it is the writing above all-- the quality of the insights, the invention, and the prose, so economical and searing in its images -- that left me inspired.

Some memorable moments were the letter Gordon receives from his son and his interpretation of it; the scene on the mountaintop with Lee Verger -- Malcolm Lowry and Stone would have gotten along well.The scene with the doctor in Mexico, when Gordon seeks drugs, was also well depicted -- the doctor's observations of his screen world patients, etc. Irony is everywhere in this book.

The film people, the Drogues were a brilliant, seedy lot: the driven son and the father who made him looking on with "gypsy eyes, passive and watchful."

I would agree that the ending was a bit tacked on. Lee must go down, but Gordon escapes too easily -- though it happens in life. I've known some incredible human wrecks who've turned on a dime and ended up leading AA meetings, etc. Still in a novel we need more.

All in all, you are spending time with Stone the fine writer in this tale of Hollywood and the savagery of the image world: light that reveals, images that devour.

This was a great book for me.

(Damascus Gate was so different, more erudite in its approach to a very different story.)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A view into the inner world and dance poetry of despair, July 22, 2001

By 

Earl Hazell (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Children of Light (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)

The last fifteen or so pages of this fine novel dissapointed me to such a degree that I had to sit back and analyse why. One reason is that the ending is simply trite compared to the rest of the book in my opinion. Another is that it may not have been able to end in a way that would have pleased me no matter how it ended. But yet another, and perhaps the most important: I was enjoying it, and ending the book meant that the journey I also took with the characters came to an end, like a good party. This book rates three and a half stars for me, but closer to a full four than three.

I found this book by chance at a discount book store in the mid west and truly enjoyed it for one overarching reason: few times have I read a book by an author who made one profound gift so palpable in his creation of despair driven characters. And that gift of craft is simple: Robert Stone has a beautiful way of displaying, without judgement, the near transcendental lucidity that exists in madness. At so many times you knew exactly what his characters were going to do, but you knew it the same way you knew the plot of THE GODFATHER before you popped it in the VCR for the upteenth time. It was the dance of his characters in the context of their love affair with everything damaging within the world and themselves; their multi-layered wheel-within-a-wheel dance of insanity on top of artistry on top of genius on top of lonliness on top of despair, on top of anger, on top of rage, on top of beauty, on top of addiction, and codependency, on top of modern and Hollywood society, on top of true love, ON TOP OF INSANITY... At its lowest moments, the book is a soap opera with an ending seemingly designed to be followed by commercials. At its highest moments however, the book is a spellbinding maze that I would gladly walk through again, as knowing where it begins and where it ends has no bearing on the journey on which it takes you in between.

Defintiely a good weekend summer read.