An Accident Waiting to Happen Children of Light

By Paul Gray

Gordon Walker, a screenwriter and sometime actor, has hit a bad patch of life. True, his summer appearance in Seattle in the title role of King Lear was modestly successful and personally satisfying. But during the run, his wife of some 20 years left him; his two sons are far away and growing increasingly remote; and he is back in Hollywood pursuing some familiar bad habits: "For the past few weeks, he had been getting by on alcohol and a ten- gram stash of cocaine and he had begun to feel as though he might die quite soon."

Those familiar with any of Author Robert Stone's three earlier novels will immediately recognize Gordon Walker as one of the writer's wounded refugees of the 1960s and a very bad accident waiting to happen. Part of the fascination of Children of Light comes from watching the author nudge his damaged hero through seedy surroundings down the path toward disaster. Walker has what he thinks is a good idea. He will drive down the Baja peninsula to where a screenplay of his is being shot. He wants to see Lu Anne Bourgeois, a former lover and soul mate in the use of controlled substances, who is known professionally as Lee Verger and who stars in the movie.

This project, an adaptation of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, has begun to attract attention as a modestly budgeted sleeper that just might translate high-minded feminism into box-office success. Walker confides to his agent his plan to check on the proceedings, and he responds with weary irony: "Terrific, Gordo. You're just what they need down there. You can hassle Lee and piss on the press. Get drunk, start fights. Just like old times, right?"

Stone cuts to location, where a few little problems have cropped up even before Walker arrives. Lu Anne has taken herself off the medication that is supposed to control her schizophrenia because, as she explains to her psychiatrist husband, "I'm finding the drug very hard to work behind." + Unwilling to face what may follow, the husband goes ahead with plans to take their two children on a visit to his parents in South Africa. His departure leaves the star alone to face her "Long Friends," hallucinatory specters that have attended her since her Louisiana childhood. She must also deal with Dongan Lowndes, an author who once wrote a critically acclaimed first novel and has since settled for prestigious journalistic assignments. He is on the set of The Awakening at the invitation of a nervous producer, who is eager for a culturally affirmative notice from a New York magazine. Walker, on his way down to this troubled scene, knows in advance what benefits this particular reporter is likely to bestow: "Lowndes can't get it on to write and he hates to see people work. He'll nail them to a tree."

When Walker shows up, the pretty production assistant who has been assigned to keep him and his bad influence away from Lu Anne complains about the surrounding dullness: "This is all very tame stuff, if you ask me. Outside of the usual drunks. It's so tranquil and businesslike it's almost boring." Walker remarks, "That could change overnight." But before he sets his catastrophe in motion, Stone displays an intriguing cast of behind-the-screen characters. The director, Walter Drogue Jr., is the son of another director, "a man from the mists of legend, a contemporary of Walsh and Sturges and Hawkes." For reasons not entirely clear, the old man is on the set and becoming interested in the nubile woman who is Lu Anne's stand-in. "Maybe there's something there, eh?" he asks his son. "Maybe nature didn't intend her for just an extra." Drogue the younger replies, "Nature intended her for a water spaniel. She can't name the days of the week."

Nearly everyone on this set seems to have an entertainingly mean mouth. The old director proves a match for his son when it comes to exchanging insults: "Some people are brought up in poverty," he notes casually, "and they become cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become guttersnipes." And when Dongan Lowndes, who has fallen heavily off the wagon, says that "the world can get on quite well" without a film version of his novel, Walker offers a laconic thought: "If we get into what the world can do without . . . God knows where we'll end."

Stone is as adept as ever at portraying haunted, weak, self-destructive people. In the past, though, he has tossed such creatures into the eddies of larger events. In A Hall of Mirrors (1967), a pot-smoking disk jockey in New Orleans stumbles into the fringes of a radical right-wing uprising. Dog Soldiers (1974) depicted California drug traffic as the Viet Nam War coming home to roost. A Flag for Sunrise (1981) showed some misfits sinking into a vortex of Central American revolution. The background stakes in Children of Light are, by comparison, inconsequential. A movie budgeted at a mere $7 million will go down the tubes if Lu Anne somehow manages to play her affliction out to its final scene and destroy herself. Whether Walker lives or dies hardly makes a dime's worth of difference to anyone, including him. Stone's saga of these two heedless souls is both enthralling and a little disappointing. The conclusion hardly matters. All the fun, most of it wonderfully nasty, is to be had in getting there.