Death Black Haired Girl Robert Stone

Death of the Black-Haired Girl (Hardcover) Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program (What's this?) "Death of the Black-Haired Girl" is a thinly plotted story, but with correspondingly rich characterizations and a good bit of social and philosophical commentary by Robert Stone.

At the center of the novel is Maud, a blinding comet across the Amesbury college sky who, without giving much away, crashes to earth. The remaining main characters - Professor Steven Brookman, her faculty adviser, Ed Stack, her dying father, her roommate Shell, her college counselor Jo Carr, and police officer Lt. Salmone all pivot around her.

At the opening, brilliant, beautiful, headstrong Maud is having an affair with Brookman. When he later learns his wife is pregnant, he decides it can't continue. At the same time, Maud decides to counter anti-abortion protesters with an inflammatory piece in the college paper that riles the campus. Coincidentally, or not, those twin stresses on her are followed by the novel's central tragedy.

"Death" has a somber, heavy feel as its main characters wrestle with life's cruelty. Mr. Stone repeatedly returns to the "wretched laws of life." Brookman wonders if his extra-marital sins could have "brought down all this death on us?" Maud's father, a retired police officer, lonely, bitter and dying of lung disease, wonders if his malfeasance on the job might have caused the tragedy in a kind of cosmic retribution.

Religion and the Catholic church dwell in the dark. In a not entirely effective strand, Shell's unstable, religious ex haunts the story's periphery. More central, did the anti-abortion protesters react to Maud's story? Jo Carr, an ex-nun, is haunted by memories of a priest called "The Mourner" going rogue amid vicious class violence during her South American mission. And the local parish rebuffs a heart-rending request by Maud's father. Mr. Stone writes, "Maud ... would have been fine in the end with a little less of God's appalling mercy."

At less than 300 pages, "Death" is an easy, quick read. At its' heart, "Death" is a thought-provoking, well-written book from a distinguished novelist. And people living in, or familiar with, New England can have fun trying to place "Amesbury," a quintessential college town with its historic common (town green).


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