1,001 Novels: A Library of America
A Hall of Mirrors (1967)
by Robert Stone
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 8/28
I decided I can't handle Mississippi straight up so I'm going to alternate with Louisiana and Florida. I'm also done with all the Mississippi/Louisiana Audiobooks I can handle, so it's hard copy library books from here on out. A Hall of Mirrors was Stone's first novel- he won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers in 1974. Stone was a finalist for the National Book Award three more times, but I would put him the "mostly forgotten" category- writers like Pynchon and Delillo took similar themes of paranoia and corruption at the heart of the American Dream and came up with something that appealed to critics and professors, Stone reads more like a linear descendant of Hemingway. I did enjoy A Hall of Mirrors, about an alcoholic radioman who stumbles into a nefarious ultra-right-wing conspiracy to... do what I don't know exactly. Some kind of a Civil War 2 plot I suppose, though the scheme remains hazy.
No question that A Hall of Mirrors stands out against the field of YA lit, chick lit and trauma-porn favored by editor Susan Straight. I enjoyed the depiction of down-n-out New Orleans circa the 1960s. Cool.
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