Stone drifts in 'Bay of Souls'

Jay Pawlowski, Special To The News

Friday, April 18, 2003

Readers of Robert Stone's latest novel, Bay of Souls, will find the author visiting familiar territory: The alienated, cynical protagonist caught up in a mess of corruption and descending into the darker reaches of the human soul.

In that respect, Bay of Souls builds an excellent, if well-worn, plot from the snowy, windswept campus of a rural university. Michael Ahearn, an English professor bored with his mundane life and his stable family, meets the seductive Lara Purcell while helping a student put together her thesis committee. It's always clear to the reader - and to Michael's tough wife Kristin - that Michael can't seem to keep his eyes off other women.

Yet whether he would cross the line and risk losing his wife and son, whom he loves very much, for a little adventure is questionable.

Lara, however, proves too much for him. In fact, she doesn't even give him a chance to resist. She is everything Michael's life is not: worldly, exotic, forward and sexy. After a couple racquetball dates followed by trysts at Lara's house, Michael begins to question her mysterious past and finds out that she has ties not only to a secret organization on her Caribbean home island of St. Trinity but also to a voodoo-like religion. For all her allure and beauty, Lara believes she "has no soul" because her brother, upon his death a year ago, stole it from her and gave it to the spirit of an evil woman.

Now she must return to her homeland and engage in a ceremony to steal it back, and she asks Michael along for the trip.

Here is where things start to fall apart. Once Michael and Lara get to St. Trinity, Bay of Souls loses its focus and turns away from the engaging moral dilemma that characterizes the book's early chapters. Stone spends too much time on Lara, her family's ties with Central American political corruption and a Colombian drug cartel, and her unconvincing quest to retrieve her soul.

Michael's own compelling soul-searching becomes strangely silent, and although the book suggests, in a halluncinatory way, that the gods of Lara's religion have a hand in the couple's fate, it is often difficult for the reader to accept that Michael doesn't just turn tail and return to his family - especially when the sounds of automatic gunfire and voodoo drums become all too regular.

Even so, Stone's writing is powerful and often gripping, and that strength alone makes Bay of Souls worthwhile. He renders arguments between Michael and Kristin, who are both English teachers, with perfect pitch. At one point, their quarrel in the kitchen takes a quick and realistic turn when Michael corrects his wife's grammar on a who-whom rule.

Stone also infuses his narrative with effective rhythm and thoughtful insight: "How could he sleep? He had slept but forgotten nothing. His boy had been there the whole time. Prayer. No. You did not pray for things. Prayers, like Franklin's key on a kite, attracted the lightning, burned out your mind and soul."

Another passage, during which Michael faces the threat of drowning while scuba diving, is so intense readers will hold their breath along with the suffocating protagonist.

And although Stone's word choice is sometimes over-the-top (one has to wonder if a character's mustache needs to be described as "tragicomic"), Bay of Souls carries itself well. It is harsh when it needs to be harsh, eloquent when it needs to be eloquent.

This is to be expected from Stone, whose career spans seven novels (including the bestsellers Outerbridge Reach and Damascus Gate), four decades, and some wild times spent as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in the 1960s. But Bay of Souls, despite its merits, doesn't rank at the top of Stone's work.

Jay Pawlowski is a free-lance writer living in Denver.