Children of Light

by Robert Stone

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679735939
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/28/1992
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Robert Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, won a William Faulkner Foundation Award. Dog Soldiers received a National Book Award, and A Flag for Sunrise won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His other honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the John Dos Passos Prize for literature, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Both A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers were made into major motion pictures. Mr. Stone dies in 2015.

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant and wonderful...Stone is an amazingly deft novelist...One of our best writers."—The New York Review of Books

"Richly literate, [Children of Light] moves the reader beyond despair, to something approaching transcendence, and confirms Robert Stone as one of America's finest writers." —Village Voice

"Harrowing." —The New York Times 

From the Publisher

The most unloved child of all Stone's work (even editor Robert Gottlieb hated it), this novel contains the psychic framework of a good noir while simultaneously being the burnout death of the genre (despite noble attempts at resurrection by Jonathan Lethem (Gun With Occasional Music) and Charlie Smith (Chimney Rock). Stone dispenses the crime elements offstage, and then wallows in drugs, suicide, madness, Oedipal failures and Mexico -- the traditional dumping ground for noir.
— Salon

David Bowman

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.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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. Moviemaking images of dark and light, illusion and invention is 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 fiction by the author of Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975. Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.

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