This edition brings together in one volume all four of these novels, along with his last, unpublished book and a streamlined version of his first. It is devoutly to be wished that some quixotic publisher might re-issue Spackman's On the Decay of Humanism , a critical book of astonishing arrogance, brio, and erudition. No one, now, writes like Spackman, though there are definite affinities between him and Edmund White, or Nabokov, or, perhaps most of all, James Merrill. In these seven stories written over the past 30 years, Stone's stormy relationship with irony, his companion and weapon, is on fiery display. The relationship has developed like a good marriage, leading his characters to fractured but increasingly brilliant episodes of self-revelation.
More recent protagonists struggle to maintain a precarious recovery.
But Stone refuses to let hot topics such as abuse trivialize his furious compassion. Not likely, I'm afraid. For all that, these first two books are good to have. His movies recount fatalistic stories about grace and destruction as it were without comment, but to powerful and altogether singular effect. Notes lays out the principles behind this practice in aphoristic form.