KEY POINTS:
They say that if you can remember the 60s you weren't there. The almost aptly-named author demonstrates otherwise in an entertaining, insightful and sometimes pompous memoir.
It is preceded by four pages of excerpts of glowing reviews and followed by an interview with the "legendary" writer and a selection from the New York Public Library's Robert Stone Papers. His name appears at the foot of every lefthand page.
No lack of ego here, then, and there is an arrogance in Stone's assumption that readers will be fascinated by his life and times. But perhaps that's unfair: not many books would get written without an assumption of readers' interest, and Stone did some interesting stuff.
He certainly got around - New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, LA, Mexico, London, Paris - while raising kids, doing a variety of jobs, writing his first novel (A Hall of Mirrors, made into a movie starring Paul Newman), getting stuck on his second novel, hanging out with Ken Kesey and pals (hero worship of the Cuckoo's Nest author gets tedious).
Also protest marches, of course, and drugs. And once - fully understandably, laudably even - he was pelted with bananas while reading poetry to a jazz soundtrack. Some of it is predictable. There's plenty on drug-taking, although the title refers not to good dope but a dawn light. Stone has a sometimes long-winded, archaic style - "of her comeliness I have no doubt ... plainly bespeaks an impulsiveness of appetite" - and uses words like "athwart".
When he describes gazing, stoned, at floodlit Notre Dame and reflects on the magic shimmer that will always flicker in his heart, I was close to giving up. But the next chapter is a hilarious account of his jobs in sleaze-ball hackery, putting headlines such as "Skydiver Devoured By Starving Birds" on fictitious reports in scurrilous tabloids.
"Invented stories are so liberating and bright with possibility," he observes, "while the true shit keeps you bound to a fallen world." His book is never boring and there's no doubt Stone is a good writer; I just don't think he's quite as good as he thinks he is.
* David Lawrence is an Auckland reviewer.
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
By Robert Stone (HarperCollins $22.99)
