From the Publisher
"His voice is probably the most distinctive of his generation . . . an extraordinary achievement." Boston Globe
"A Triumph" The New York Times
"One of the truly great journeys of contemporary American fiction." The Chicago Sun-Times
Library Journal
In this stern but not unhopeful cautionary tale, Stone depicts Owen Browne and his circle, the powerful American upper-middle class. By coupling this portrait with innovative treatment of the journey motif, Stone bids fair to capture the public imagination. Browne seemingly embodies privilege and success. Yet, avid for honor and glory, he enters a highly publicized, round-the-world, singlehanded sailboat race. As the loneliness and exertion of his voyage test Browne, so the attention of a shallow filmmaker test Anne, Browne's wife. Both learn truths about themselves and one another which destroy one spouse but which compel the other to further trials of strength and will. Superb foreshadowing and some glorious phrasing make even occasionally puzzling devices (e.g., major decisions are almost always reported rather than depicted) seem acceptable facets of Stone's felicitous style. -- Jane S. Bakerman, Indiana State University, Terre Haute
Library Journal
In this stern but not unhopeful cautionary tale, Stone depicts Owen Browne and his circle, the powerful American upper-middle class. By coupling this portrait with innovative treatment of the journey motif, Stone bids fair to capture the public imagination. Browne seemingly embodies privilege and success. Yet, avid for honor and glory, he enters a highly publicized, round-the-world, singlehanded sailboat race. As the loneliness and exertion of his voyage test Browne, so the attention of a shallow filmmaker test Anne, Browne's wife. Both learn truths about themselves and one another which destroy one spouse but which compel the other to further trials of strength and will. Superb foreshadowing and some glorious phrasing make even occasionally puzzling devices (e.g., major decisions are almost always reported rather than depicted) seem acceptable facets of Stone's felicitous style. -- Jane S. Bakerman, Indiana State University, Terre Haute
New York Times Books of the Century
...[T]old in a gritty idiom, this shapely novel has great power. (1992)
Chicago Sun-Times
One of the truly great journeys of contemporary American fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Stone's best book sinceDog Soldiers, and arguably even better. An Annapolis grad and Vietnam vet, now a sailboat salesman in Connecticut, the elegant and thoughtful Owen Browne finds himself enrolled in a grand adventure—sailing solo around the world—after his millionaire boat-maker boss, who was meant to make the sail, disappears under shady circumstances. A cynical documentary filmmaker, Strickland, will make a movie of this voyage—sure that Owen's WASP uprightness and natural election will unravel under the stress. It is to be partly a movie that Owen himself will shoot at sea, and that Strickland will augment with interviews with Owen's lovely but quietly desperate and alcoholic wife, Anne, as well as with the various corporate players in what Strickland sees as just another corporate-American public-relations show. Owen goes uneasily off to sea (he is a clumsy, only half-competent sailor, but Vietnam has left him with a reckoning with truth and courage still unfulfilled), and Strickland commences his film—and then everything goes a lot differently than expected. A book about self-reconfiguration, the novel becomes a constellation of collapse: the merely aesthetic fails the pure, elliptical Strickland as he falls in love with Anne (a character of startling human intricacy), whose infidelity is her own ethical malfunction. Owen's shoddily made boat starts coming apart in the terrible sea, but by then it hardly matters to him: Having been gradually shaken by revelation of the paradoxical "singularity" of the All, he fakes his positions and wanders amidst religious sublimity and mad self-cancellation. Stone never has written better. Plot seems theonly element occasionally reached for here, sometimes too slow, too quickened—but Stone's matchless dialogue and Melvillean sea-writing (and Melvillean themes: con-games, the death of myth) more than compensate. Ashen yet rich, prophetically unswerving but clement: a novel of true American literary significance.
