A new-old reading from Robert Stone by Sarah Vollmann News Editor From one look at author Robert Stone, you’d never guess his past. His past seemed hidden even for the hour that he spoke at Russell House on Wed., starting at 8p.m., as part of the Distinguished Living Writers Series. Growing up in New York City, Stone’s schizophrenic single mother was in and out of hospitals. Stone dropped out of high school and New York University in the late 1950s, then worked odd jobs—like as a copy boy for the New York Daily News—while drifting from place to place with his wife and baby daughter. All the while, Stone read and wrote poetry, experiencing some of the late beat movement in New York. When Stone began his first novel, in 1961, it earned immediate acclaim. Its first chapter gained him a fellowship at Stanford; another fellowship came with the first half. Finally, A Hall of Mirrors won the William Faulkner Foundation’s prize for best novel of the year, and soon, Stone was moving among jobs as writer in residence at universities all over the United States. Five more novels and a collection of short stories later, Stone is now widely recognized for dark, cynical work that confronts modern problems from drugs to sexual perversion to political corruption. On Wednesday, Stone read the first half of “Fun with Problems,” a short story that will appear later this winter in the New Yorker. The story’s protagonist is Matthews, a recently divorced lawyer in a depressed northeastern town who interviews a teenager in jail for drug charges. Everything about Stone’s reading was just right. He pronounced each word with perfect diction—enough to show that he was deliberate and exacting, but not so much that he came across as anything but effortless. At the same time, his words glided so smoothly that one had to follow his gaze from his bushy eyebrows and Santa Claus beard to notice when he turned a page. “His narrative voice and amazing descriptive quality came across,” said Chapin Kelly ’04, who enjoyed the talk though he had not read any of Stone’s work before. “When he stopped reading halfway through the story, it was as though I was right in the middle of a thought.” The story was written, too, in a delicate and deliberate way. To convey the loneliness and economic depression of the fictional town of Hampton, much of the story explores its sociology. Hampton is known for its psychiatric hospital and jail. Matthews is the only inhabitant of a dilapidated bed and breakfast because no one else wants to rent rooms from his Hispanic landlords. “I feel that he is the master of dialogue,” said Paul Yoon ’02. “It just stops my heart when he reads it.” Yoon was particularly struck by the slight variations in Stone’s voice when he read the words of different characters. Stone wrote his first novel before his first short story. In novels, he explained, one “can postpone the ending.” He does not write a plan for stories before starting them, but “I know kind of what the ending is like, what the atmosphere of the ending is like.” He doesn’t always know what will be in the middle. Focused on ultimate literary success through his drifting young adulthood, Stone’s life could be like that, too.

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