"You look like a white captive," Shelby said to Maud.
Maud saw herself in a mirror on the bathroom door, winter pale, wrapped in a Salish blanket. She pulled the blanket tighter around her thighs and shoulders. Her skin was very fair but rosy after her shower.
"You think?"
"Totally," her roommate said.
Maud huddled beside a bay window of her suite, shivering deliciously in the drafts of ice-edged wind that filtered through the plaster and old stone of the building. Cheerless dawn lit the pinnacles and tracery of the Gothic towers across the Common. One by one, southeast by northwest, the trunks of the elms along the walks lightened to gray. All at once, the street lamps died together.....
This is the opening of Robert Stone's "Death of the Black-Haired Girl." It's a novel very clearly about Yale, where Stone taught. In 1998, a student had been murdered there.
The student was Suzanne Jovin, and she had just finished a dissertation on Osama bin Laden. (This was before 9/11!) She was meant to meet someone around Phelps Gate, the crumbling seat of the Classics department, and she was participating in an exchange of GRE books. (This is the fuzzy story my memory has supplied, at least.) Within minutes of her slated Phelps meeting, her body was found far away, near New Haven's East Rock. She had been stabbed to death. An assailant was never identified.
Rumors implicated the young person's advisor in the murder. Nothing could ever be proved, and the advisor had his life more or less ruined. (This was covered in the NYTimes.) Could the murder have something to do with Osama? Had Suzanne discovered something she wasn't supposed to know?
Recently, a troubled former student muttered something about being involved in the murder, and then he took his own life. I don't think his mutterings have been proved conclusive--and the case remains mysterious.
Here's why I like Stone's novel. It's about a Jovin-esque case, but it's also about so much more. It reminds me of Kushner. Before writing "Angels," Kushner thought, I'm going to write about Roy Cohn, but I'm also going to write about Mormons and drag queens and Antarctica and the Ozone layer and the Old Testament. Before writing about a Jovin-ish issue, Robert Stone thought: I'm also going to write about Native Americans and town/gown relations and 9/11 and faith and madness.
So all of that is in "The Death of the Black-Haired Girl." The very first sentence makes us think of spectral Native American presences. Stone invents a motto for his fictional college: "Lux in umbras procedet," which is very clearly a reference to Yale's "Lux et Veritas." And Stone goes on to observe that this seemingly innocuous reference to "Lux" is actually a racist allusion to "conquering the Savages." Spreading "light" to the Other. (It's noteworthy Stone wrote all this before the Calhoun College controversy. For decades, Yale had a dorm named after a pro-slavery apologist! Not merely a Fellow Traveler--someone who enthusiastically embraced slavery!)
I love that Stone evokes many thoughts simply by having one white girl say to another, "You look like a white savage."
I'm also enchanted by Stone's attention to the destitute, and to residents of halfway houses, in New Haven. Stone writes about how certain characters interact with undergrads--in coffee shops, for example. He observes that, when you graduate, you have the faces of various eccentric beggars engraved on your memory.
Stone says that many of the female undergrads are taller--by significant margins--than the male destitute around them. How many other writers would notice that? Stone is bringing us into a Hobbesean world, to questions about nutrition--things we might not otherwise think about.
Stone has great empathy for his victim, the "black-haired girl." Before getting killed, she writes at length about abortion, in a deliberately provocative and offensive way. Stone is so accurate in describing how an undergrad can be both extremely clever and extremely childish and ignorant.
Having fought in a war, Stone seems to have special awareness of how people can lose their minds. One of the sinister undercurrents in "Black-Haired" concerns a cop who lifted wallets off the corpses at Ground Zero. (Could Maud's murder be a form of retribution?) Other writers might judge or feel bewildered by behavior such as this--but you sense that Stone understands and tolerates, and that's the mark of a great, unusual artist.
When this novel came out, it didn't make much of a splash--but I very much enjoy its eccentricity. It's not the police procedural you might expect, but kudos to Stone for being brave and following his inner wishes. This is a story with rewards for the reader.
P.S. Another detail I love: As a high-school student, Maud is told she resembles a Whistler painting. So she shoplifts a book on that painting from the Met's gift shop. She is caught, and worries that the infraction will mean rejection from her college. Such an incisive sketch: of entitlement, of being a reckless teeanger, of being an intellectually-curious teenager, of timelessness (the idea that history is cyclical).
P.P.S. One detail that bugs me: Stone keeps having characters wonder why Maud's advisor did not intercede before the publication of a risky editorial. But advisors have very little to do with their students, in most cases. It's odd that Stone--with deep campus connections--failed to realize that. (And an editor also failed?)
P.P.P.S. There's also a fun history of doors and locking at Yale, with an awareness that a lock is much more than a physical object. It's a statement about privilege, exclusion, and human relationships. Locks were not always a big deal on the campus. Now, there is such a concerted effort to shut out the outside world, "certain professors retired rather than having to contend with all of the new locks."
P.P.P.P.S. Another detail that fascinates me: The undergrads tie their heroin money in a sock, then affix the sock to a part of a bridge. They go off to a bodega. When they return, they find their money gone, and heroin is in the sock. Can this really have happened in New Haven? Such a juicy metaphor for the complexity of town/gown interactions.
P.P.P.P.P.S. And another part that has me obsessed: "The city police force had endured a few embarrassing scandals and did not enjoy total confidence in the high places with which most college students connected. There were also some confusions of history....Many people thought the issues dated from some violent incidents in the sixties, but in fact the hostility went much further back. Nearly a century before Vietnam, students in Brooks Brothers tweed had gathered to throw snowballs at the cops marching in Amesbury's St. Patrick's Day parade or some other celebration. Pranks the rich kids thought droll roused ancient hatreds in the immigrant-descended police. The town-and-gown business in the city had always been bitter, and was more so when the factories closed..."
Maud saw herself in a mirror on the bathroom door, winter pale, wrapped in a Salish blanket. She pulled the blanket tighter around her thighs and shoulders. Her skin was very fair but rosy after her shower.
"You think?"
"Totally," her roommate said.
Maud huddled beside a bay window of her suite, shivering deliciously in the drafts of ice-edged wind that filtered through the plaster and old stone of the building. Cheerless dawn lit the pinnacles and tracery of the Gothic towers across the Common. One by one, southeast by northwest, the trunks of the elms along the walks lightened to gray. All at once, the street lamps died together.....
This is the opening of Robert Stone's "Death of the Black-Haired Girl." It's a novel very clearly about Yale, where Stone taught. In 1998, a student had been murdered there.
The student was Suzanne Jovin, and she had just finished a dissertation on Osama bin Laden. (This was before 9/11!) She was meant to meet someone around Phelps Gate, the crumbling seat of the Classics department, and she was participating in an exchange of GRE books. (This is the fuzzy story my memory has supplied, at least.) Within minutes of her slated Phelps meeting, her body was found far away, near New Haven's East Rock. She had been stabbed to death. An assailant was never identified.
Rumors implicated the young person's advisor in the murder. Nothing could ever be proved, and the advisor had his life more or less ruined. (This was covered in the NYTimes.) Could the murder have something to do with Osama? Had Suzanne discovered something she wasn't supposed to know?
Recently, a troubled former student muttered something about being involved in the murder, and then he took his own life. I don't think his mutterings have been proved conclusive--and the case remains mysterious.
Here's why I like Stone's novel. It's about a Jovin-esque case, but it's also about so much more. It reminds me of Kushner. Before writing "Angels," Kushner thought, I'm going to write about Roy Cohn, but I'm also going to write about Mormons and drag queens and Antarctica and the Ozone layer and the Old Testament. Before writing about a Jovin-ish issue, Robert Stone thought: I'm also going to write about Native Americans and town/gown relations and 9/11 and faith and madness.
So all of that is in "The Death of the Black-Haired Girl." The very first sentence makes us think of spectral Native American presences. Stone invents a motto for his fictional college: "Lux in umbras procedet," which is very clearly a reference to Yale's "Lux et Veritas." And Stone goes on to observe that this seemingly innocuous reference to "Lux" is actually a racist allusion to "conquering the Savages." Spreading "light" to the Other. (It's noteworthy Stone wrote all this before the Calhoun College controversy. For decades, Yale had a dorm named after a pro-slavery apologist! Not merely a Fellow Traveler--someone who enthusiastically embraced slavery!)
I love that Stone evokes many thoughts simply by having one white girl say to another, "You look like a white savage."
I'm also enchanted by Stone's attention to the destitute, and to residents of halfway houses, in New Haven. Stone writes about how certain characters interact with undergrads--in coffee shops, for example. He observes that, when you graduate, you have the faces of various eccentric beggars engraved on your memory.
Stone says that many of the female undergrads are taller--by significant margins--than the male destitute around them. How many other writers would notice that? Stone is bringing us into a Hobbesean world, to questions about nutrition--things we might not otherwise think about.
Stone has great empathy for his victim, the "black-haired girl." Before getting killed, she writes at length about abortion, in a deliberately provocative and offensive way. Stone is so accurate in describing how an undergrad can be both extremely clever and extremely childish and ignorant.
Having fought in a war, Stone seems to have special awareness of how people can lose their minds. One of the sinister undercurrents in "Black-Haired" concerns a cop who lifted wallets off the corpses at Ground Zero. (Could Maud's murder be a form of retribution?) Other writers might judge or feel bewildered by behavior such as this--but you sense that Stone understands and tolerates, and that's the mark of a great, unusual artist.
When this novel came out, it didn't make much of a splash--but I very much enjoy its eccentricity. It's not the police procedural you might expect, but kudos to Stone for being brave and following his inner wishes. This is a story with rewards for the reader.
P.S. Another detail I love: As a high-school student, Maud is told she resembles a Whistler painting. So she shoplifts a book on that painting from the Met's gift shop. She is caught, and worries that the infraction will mean rejection from her college. Such an incisive sketch: of entitlement, of being a reckless teeanger, of being an intellectually-curious teenager, of timelessness (the idea that history is cyclical).
P.P.S. One detail that bugs me: Stone keeps having characters wonder why Maud's advisor did not intercede before the publication of a risky editorial. But advisors have very little to do with their students, in most cases. It's odd that Stone--with deep campus connections--failed to realize that. (And an editor also failed?)
P.P.P.S. There's also a fun history of doors and locking at Yale, with an awareness that a lock is much more than a physical object. It's a statement about privilege, exclusion, and human relationships. Locks were not always a big deal on the campus. Now, there is such a concerted effort to shut out the outside world, "certain professors retired rather than having to contend with all of the new locks."
P.P.P.P.S. Another detail that fascinates me: The undergrads tie their heroin money in a sock, then affix the sock to a part of a bridge. They go off to a bodega. When they return, they find their money gone, and heroin is in the sock. Can this really have happened in New Haven? Such a juicy metaphor for the complexity of town/gown interactions.
P.P.P.P.P.S. And another part that has me obsessed: "The city police force had endured a few embarrassing scandals and did not enjoy total confidence in the high places with which most college students connected. There were also some confusions of history....Many people thought the issues dated from some violent incidents in the sixties, but in fact the hostility went much further back. Nearly a century before Vietnam, students in Brooks Brothers tweed had gathered to throw snowballs at the cops marching in Amesbury's St. Patrick's Day parade or some other celebration. Pranks the rich kids thought droll roused ancient hatreds in the immigrant-descended police. The town-and-gown business in the city had always been bitter, and was more so when the factories closed..."
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