SOURCE: Packer, George. “Robert Stone: The Funny Apocalypse.” Dissent 40, no. 1 (winter 1993): 115-19.

In the following essay, Packer provides an overview of Stone's novels, thematic concerns, and character types, noting that although Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach are weaker than his first three novels, Stone's visionary critique of American society remains underappreciated by a majority of critics.

For a quarter century Robert Stone has been the American Baudelaire—poète maudit of Catholic mysticism and controlled substances, critic of modern folly, romantic pessimist in love with apocalypse. His five novels are all alike in structure and atmosphere, carrying two or three characters through a tense, incremental convergence toward catastrophe; taken together, they diagnose sick America in the rush and crash and flashback of Vietnam, which reverberates through all his work. And like Dos Passos and Faulkner and Bellow and Mailer, Stone writes novels that demand to be taken...