Children of Light, Robert Stone’s fourth novel, takes its title from Robert Lowell’s 1944 poem of the same name.[1] This short, not particularly well-known poem—which also provided the title for Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1966)—paints a horrific picture of an American apocalypse:
Our Fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,
You planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter in a hall of mirrors,
And light is where the ancient blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.
In its nightmarishly surreal, aggressively “visionary,” and rather overwrought images of mirrors, lights, and blood; in its preoccupation with violence and evil, history and religion; and above all in its fanatically held conviction that modern America (of the arrogant, destructive Puritan heritage) is the scourge of the world as well as its own worst enemy, Lowell’s poem might justly be viewed as something of a touchstone not only for Robert Stone’s new novel but for his entire oeuvre. Like Lowell’s poem, Stone’s novels want to tell us what it really means to be an American, what it really means to live in the twentieth century.
Except in A Hall of Mirrors, Stone’s way of approaching the task of defining the
