Thursday, May 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Soul asylum

By John Ziebell

Michael Ahearn, the protagonist of Robert Stone's new novel Bay of Souls, has a perfect life. He has a beautiful wife and a wonderful son and a cushy job as a tenured professor at a small unnamed university in an anonymous Midwestern town. On the opening weekend of deer season, Ahearn heads for the woods with his cronies, oblivious, as most of us are, to the potential threat of radical change. If there's a more structurally seamless opening to a recent book than the first chapter of Bay of Souls, I certainly haven't come across it.

Ahearn is the hunter who does not shoot. He likes the macho camaraderie, but he's not there for the sport or the meat; he's a neutral observer. What he does manage to do is be away from home when his son almost dies and his wife, in saving him, is hospitalized as well. The near-miss is prophetic, and we see Ahearn weigh the appeal and the irony of his deepest, most deceptively simplistic wish: to be a "serious person, a grownup at last, and no worry over things that educated people had not troubled themselves with practically for centuries. Free at last."

But that resolution, even flawed, is unattainable. The accident cues total dysfunction in the perfect family. Ahearn loses the ability to communicate with his son Paul; his wife, Kirsten, retreats into religion, psychologically curled around the tenets of Catholicism. In the midst of his attempts to regain his emotional footing, Ahearn finds himself on a thesis committee with political science professor Marie-Claire Purcell, a Sorbonne-trained think-tank mercenary who, through a serendipitous chain of events, has been exiled to the academic backwater Ahearn inhabits.

"One of the overpaid Eurotrash faculty who frequented each other's houses for edible food and adult conversation," Ahearn thinks. And Purcell fits the bill at first. She's a cool, condescending elitist with the expected degree of disdain. But Lara--the name she goes by, for no apparent reason--is a dusky Caribbean native who represents exoticism on many levels, from her jeans to her personal philosophy. She's every bad boy's dream and Ahearn, unanchored, drifts easily into her sphere of influence. It's not a question of deliberately choosing her over his family; like his deer hunting, it's more participation without investment.

There's a surreal sense to the narrative by the time Ahearn follows his lover to St. Trinity, a very Haitian island in the Caribbean, on his spring break. She's there to perform a series of vodoun rites to recall the soul of her brother on the one-year anniversary of his death; he's there, once again, without real purpose, situated impotently between fervent Catholicism of his wife and its dark parallel in the rituals embraced by his mistress. But in the Third World, agnosticism isn't just religious. The climate is heavy with the ferment of revolution and neocolonial force, its players a mélange of thugs, politicos, narcotics traffickers and Special Forces operators...and a captive population, of course, living at subsistence scale. Political and criminal situations develop and dissolve around Ahearn, who evokes those well-intentioned innocents who populate the works of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.

Those innocents usually don't fare very well; nor, we fear, will Ahearn. He will make choices, in the end, but there's a futility inherent in abandoning indecision as well. So what's it all about? Stone's answer to the Big Question is on the page, in the portrait of an average guy who, in moral terms, is not really bad, but not really adequate.

This is a polished and powerful book, but a thinner novel than Stone usually writes, and its spareness is elliptical at times. Bay of Souls lacks the figurative depth that resonates in his fatter books, the scope of descriptive passages that gave an undeniable credibility to novels like A Flag for Sunrise or Damascus Gate. This book moves faster, and maintains a greater level of tension, but at some expense in terms of how well we know characters. When Lara, alone and introspective, reflects on her real love for Ahearn, it almost comes as a surprise. Ahearn can't define even a misplaced motivation, but that's less troubling; at least he offers us consistency. And while the images of St. Trinity are vivid, the representation seems somehow unfinished. But perhaps that's a statement as well.