A Novelists Ambition to Define America – The Atlantic

The New Orleans of early-60s civil-rights battles, with its assortment of right-wing racists, do-gooders, pot-smoking hipsters, and con artists, gave Stone the material for his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, published in 1967. Stones approach to the sociopolitical situation is utterly oblique, Bell writes. With the characters paying little attention to it, it simply builds itself out of inchoate dark matter, like the late-afternoon New Orleans rainstorms. A Hall of Mirrors traces a geometry that Stone, a master of novelistic architecture, would go on to use many times: He intercuts among three protagonists who drift along on events, almost without agency, sliding downward but struggling toward some meaning that they never reach, gathering great narrative momentum as they converge on a plane of social tension thats headed toward an apocalypse.

Rheinhardt, a juicehead and former clarinet virtuoso who has squandered his talent out of self-destructive spite, arrives in New Orleans by Greyhound in the aftermath of Mardi Gras. He stumbles into a job as an announcer for an ultraconservative radio station, fabricating inflammatory reports that today ought to be called fake news. The station owner, a plutocratic bigot named Bingamon, explains to Rheinhardt: People cant see because they dont have the orientation, isnt that right? And a lot of what were trying to do is to give them that orientation. Bingamons purpose is to incite hatred and start a race war that will crush black peoples political aspirations. Rheinhardt is too lost in private despair to object.

He falls in with Geraldine, a young drifter from West Virginiaone of Stones few successfully realized female characters. For a time, Geraldine and Rheinhardt make a wounded pair in the French Quarter, until he cant bear the intimacy and drives her away. These scenes are full of a strange pathos, as when Rheinhardt notices a cigarette burn on Geraldines stomach and says,

You been ill used. Youre a salamander.

Whys that?

Youre a salamander because you walk through fire and you live on air.

Geraldine closed her eyes.

I wish, she said.

The third protagonist is their upstairs neighbor, Morgan Raineya disturbed seeker after humanness, his own and others, who goes door-to-door conducting surveys in black neighborhoods and becomes the unwitting tool of Bingamons scheme to gut the welfare rolls.

These three meet their separate fates in the novels long climax, Bingamons Patriotic Revival, a stadium rally in which a staged riot spins out of control. Stone was a realistHemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos were among his influencesand a lifelong believer in the moral valence of fiction; he shunned the surrealism and metafiction of his contemporaries John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. But A Hall of Mirrors, like much of Stones other work, ends in a hallucinatory spasm of altered consciousness and rhetorical excess. Geraldine, stoned and desperate, searches the stadium in vain for Rheinhardt, who is onstage, wasted, preparing to conduct an imaginary symphony orchestra. On cue, he exhorts the crowd of thousands with a perversion of virtuosity that displays Stones power to combine irony and terror:

Rheinhardts performance is a fun-house mockery of the kind of political theater that has lately risen from underground to occupy the main stage of American life. Years later, Stone said of his first novel: I had taken America as my subject, and all my quarrels with America went into it. They were a lovers quarrels, equal parts longing and disillusionment, held in a tension that never broke either way. Morgan Raineys blighted idealism is as central to Stones vision as Rheinhardts fluent nihilism is.

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A Novelists Ambition to Define America - The Atlantic