The life of Robert Stone contained virtually all the things one might consider essential to qualifying as a major postwar American novelist: a National Book Award (for “Dog Soldiers,” in 1975), movie adaptations, A-list friendships (Paul Newman, Nick Nolte), a succession of lucrative grants and residencies, depression exacerbated by drink and drugs, escalating advances, extensive dealings with Condé Nast, contrarian reviews in the late 1990s from Michiko Kakutani and James Wood. But whatever his credentials, however wide the recognition, Stone’s friend, the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, was still duty-bound, like virtually all first biographers, to make a full-throated case for his continuing relevance and appeal. “Child of Light” forms part of a three-pronged onslaught, along with a Library of America edition of Stone’s best-known novels and a selection of essays, “The Eye You See With,” both edited by Mr. Bell, but the reader who battles through these 2,000 pages might be forgiven for wondering at the scale of the tribute. Mr. Bell, in his role of biographer, proves as liable to presuppose his subject’s importance (“a complete maverick,” “one of the world’s most brilliant, difficult, extraordinary men”) as the writer himself was in pontifical exercises called things like “What Fiction Is For,” while the freshly canonized novels, never at the cutting edge, too often seem slickly platitudinous and baldly conventional.
