Robert Stone's fiction has consistently chronicled the troubled souls of this troubled world, from Vietnam (in the National Book Award-winning Dog Soldiers) to Jerusalem (Damascus Gate). Death of the Black-Haired Girl, only his seventh novel in nearly a 50-year career, is set in 2004 on a classic New England college campus. The novel's focus is beautiful, smart Maud Stack and her lover and professor, Steven Brookman. When Brookman's wife tells him she's pregnant again, he abruptly dismisses Maud, ending their affair with professorial rationalization: "She's here to grow up. She has to learn a few things, and one of them is that everything comes to an end."
The spurned Maud finds little help from her roommate Shell, a talented actress with a crackpot, abusive ex-husband. The school counselor, ex-nun Jo Carr, can't connect with Maud either; she has her own nightmare visions after years nursing the Indians of South America. Her father, Eddie, an emphysematous alcoholic ex-cop, is too full of self-pity and grief over the loss of his wife to help his daughter.
Angry with Brookman and the world, Maud writes an inflammatory campus newspaper story against anti-abortion protestors. When Maud is killed by a hit-and-run driver while shouting down Brookman outside his cozy faculty house, Stone's plot shifts into crime novel territory. Was the driver a vindictive anti-abortionist? Did Brookman push her into the path of the car? Can the town cops investigate without prejudice against the privileged academics?
As with all Stone's fiction, the complex characters here are all wounded, but each has his or her own forgivably human story. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.