This is often described as a minor Stone novel, because it involves Hollywood shenanigans and who cares about that. I disagree: it's not his best but it's up there with the rest of them, and not because of the flavorful prose and the scenes of flamboyant boozery, but because it's a convincing and horribly sad portrayal of love and art at their worst. Gordon (the screenwriter) would read as just another drunken/coked-up wisenheimer except for two things: he's a solid writer who understands how to work with people even though he often chooses not to, and he deeply cares for Lu Anne (the schizophrenic actor) even though he can't resist wrecking her life. Similarly, Lu Anne, self-destructive though she is, is someone you'd want to know, and she's got other things on her mind besides Gordon and her hallucinations (although the passages that deal with her psychosis, and Gordon's attempts to work with/around it, are very well done— some of the best fiction about mental illness I've ever read— it's no surprise that Stone was writing from close family experience). The movie industry setting isn't arbitrary, it's perfect for these unmoored characters: a place where usual practical concerns are temporarily on hold, extreme behavior is indulged or managed as necessary, and there's no clear line between self-interest and creativity. Stone doesn't give short shrift to the creative side either; some of the characters don't care much about what they're doing, but the director, although he's nasty and flippant, is a competent artist and the movie they're making is one I'd like to see. (The director and his wife are also interesting examples of something that's appeared several times in Stone's books: a smart, hyper-worldly couple who are truly devoted to each other and to their closest friends, but are amoral jerks to everyone else. I wonder if that's from personal experience too.) It's more solipsistic than his other novels, in that the things the two leads are struggling with all come from inside themselves, but Stone writes about those things very well and this book felt real to me. ( )

The alchemists sought to turn lead into gold, but Robert Stone did them one better: he turned lurid trash into real literature. At his best, Stone manages to make the misadventures of his sleazy, drug-soaked characters play like real tragedy. "Children of Light" is not Stone's best. His prose, which is often hard-bitten and elegant in equal measure, still sparkles in places, and he skillfully weaves strands of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" and Shakespeare's "King Lear" into a plot that describes the anguished final days of a fading film star. He also does a fine job of inhabiting a schizophrenic character, providing chillingly literal descriptions of the hallucinations that populate her inner life. What's missing from this novel, though, is any tension between idealism, however flimsy, and his characters' inevitable decline. In "Outerbridge Reach," Stone showed us the crack-up of a protagonist who was believed he possessed a great deal of moral fortitude; the characters in "Children of Light," on the other hand, are already scraping the bottom when the novel begins, and there's nothing for the reader to do but await their inevitable bad ends. Many of the characters in Stone's other novels come from respectable backgrounds and stumble into lives of crime. The panic they feel when they realize that they are in well over their heads is palpable, and important, I think, to Stone's success as a writer. By contrast, It's hardly surprising to learn that people in the film industry, where "Children of Light" is set, are emotionally shallow hedonists; a quick read through the "National Enquirer" will tell you as much. "Children of Light" is fascinating in the same way that car wrecks, or episodes of "True Hollywood Story" are, but not much in the novel takes the reader by surprise.

Stone also navigates the border that separates serious literature from sensationalism less skilfully than usual. Both Stone and his characters make liberal use of film clichés, easily assuming and discarding a series of masks and shticks. Even so, Stone sometimes struggles to put enough space between his authorial voice and their Hollywood platitudes, particularly when they discuss their romantic entanglements at length. When his exhausted, far-gone characters discuss their affections, it's almost impossible to take them seriously, and, as a consequence, Stone's own writing begins to ring a little false. This problem is perhaps made worse by the fact that the coke-addled, post-hippie screenwriter at the center of the story reminds me a bit of Stone's own jacket photographs. Still, there's a lot in "Children of Light" that is vintage Stone: his fatalistic outlook often seems to emphasize how brilliantly vibrant his writing can be. With all of its shortcomings, this novel is still recommended to Mr. Stone's admirers. ( )