The curious thing, given the gassiness of such an ambition, is how close he comes to succeeding. For without a doubt, Stone is a mighty talented writer, capable of creating characters and scenes as sharp and ugly as rusty fishhooks. The trouble is, his talent and his ambition don’t match up. He wants to emulate the moral dramas of Hawthorne and Melville, when all his best instincts keep leading him into the furtive, spooky back alleys haunted by the likes of Poe.
The story of a middle-aged man who embarks on a solo sailing race around the world as a means of finding himself, “Outerbridge Reach” never stops huffing and puffing about the meaning of it all. At the outset, Owen Browne, ex-navy man turned sailboat salesman, is living the good life in Connecticut with his slightly dipso wife, Anne. Since there are no happy characters in a Robert Stone novel, it goes without saying that these people are miserable. But then, nothing goes without saying in a Stone book, so for page after page we have to listen to their sad attempts to paper over the cracks in their lives. Owen talks like this: “In the present day, a man can live his whole life and never test his true resources.” Anne isn’t as windy, perhaps because she is filled, the author tells us, with “nameless dread.”
To immortalize Browne’s efforts, his sponsor hires a filmmaker to document the voyage. Like the other characters, Ron Strickland is smart, high-strung and disagreeable (if a movie is made of this story, a way will have to be found for James Woods to play every role). But while Strickland’s cynical snarling is initially a welcome counterpoint to the Brownes’ unctuous rectitude, before long he, too, seems like merely a pawn in Stone’s tendentious scheme.
In the book’s second half, when Stone gets Browne launched on his voyage, things pick up considerably. The sailing passages compare favorably to that other squirrelly voyage into Antarctic nothingness, Poe’s “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.” Fighting off a plague of insects that infest his boat, haunted by icebergs, bombarded by the fervid wheedlings of radio preachers, undone by the slovenly craftsmanship that turns his boat into a floating coffin, Browne is slowly forced to the lip of the abyss. Fleshing out the log of Browne’s voyage with such things as the radio transmissions between the sailor and a blind teenage ham operator, Stone says more in a few paragraphs about the lunacy at the heart of life than he manages elsewhere in hundreds of pages of high-minded heavy breathing.
Luckily, there is just enough of the spooky side of Stone to make “Outerbridge Reach” worth reading. There is also, tucked here and there, a fair amount of mean, lowdown humor-just enough, though, to make you mad there’s not more. But then, that’s the problem with Stone. He’s our most exasperating good novelist. And he could be so much better if he weren’t so intent on being great.
