Jim Dodge’s 1990 novel Stone Junction tells the life story of Daniel Pearse, a young man of preternatural talents and sharp intelligence who trains under various tutors in a secret society, steals an enormous diamond, and eventually attains enlightened apotheosis. A lot of other stuff happens too.
Dodge subtitled his novel An Alchemical Pot-Boiler, a description that punctures any premature accusations of pretension, yet also calls attention to the novel’s arcane subject matter. The subtitle’s also a joke, of course—Dodge invites us to read his 500-pager as a kind of alchemist’s cauldron, a kitchen sink overloaded with spies and thieves, gamblers and quick change artists, holy fools and madmen.
And Dodge, as promised, keeps his pot boiling. Stone Junction is a propulsive and engaging read largely because of the world he imagines for Daniel to grow up in. Stone Junction isn’t a magical realism act, but magic exists here. From a very young age, Daniel is initiated into a clandestine organization called AMO. Said aloud, as a young Daniel points out, the name “AMO” is suggestive of both “ammo” and the Latin verb amo, it’s really an acronym:
AMO is the acronym for Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws – or, as some members claim, Alchemists, Magicians, and Outlaws, which they contend was the original name. Another faction, small but vocal, insists AMO has always stood for Artists, Myth-singers, and Outriders. As you might sense, there is constant and long-standing contention about AMO’s origins and development
…AMO is a secret society – though more on the order of an open secret, in fact. Basically, AMO is a historical alliance of the mildly felonious, misfits, anarchists, shamans, earth mystics, gypsies, magicians, mad scientists, dreamers, and other socially marginal souls.
After the violent and mysterious death of his mother (and his own near-death), Daniel comes under the tutelage of those dreamers and socially-marginal souls. Extended episodes of Daniel’s working and growing under a new teacher make up the bulk of Stone Junction; these inventive and enjoyable sections are the finest parts of the book. Thomas Pynchon offers a nice catalog of Daniel’s various mentors in his introduction to the 1997 reprint of Stone Junction:
Wild Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semi-permeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled… The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise… At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta…who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.
It makes sense that Pynchon (who praises Stone Junction as “an outlaw epic for our own late era of corrupted romance and defective honor”) would stick on that big “I” Invisibility, always a byword in his own novels.
Dodge’s byword in Stone Junction is another i-word: imagination. Especially in its final third, Dodge’s novel, and its characters, repeat the importance of imaginative possibility, of imagining new realities, new states of being.
Volta is the dark sage magician guiding Daniel on his quest toward imagination. Or, rather, his quest to steal an enormous, perfectly-circular diamond from the U.S. government. He might throw Daniel into a den of lions, but our boy’s an escape artist. His last name, Pearse, among other transmutations (pierce, purse, pairs), suggests Percival, one of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. (Like Percival, Daniel is raised alone in hermetic seclusion by his solo mother.) The diamond is Daniel’s grail.
In her contemporary New York Times review of Stone Junction, Michele Slung pointed out the novel’s debt to Arthurian legends, among other sources, calling it “a post-psychedelic coming-of-age fable that’s part Thomas Pynchon, part Tolkien, part Richard Brautigan, a story that owes as much to The Once and Future King as it does to Huckleberry Finn.” Like Huck Finn, Stone Junction has a ramshackle, picaresque energy, but it nevertheless adheres to a plot, with the mystical diamond a MacGuffin for Daniel (among other thieves and spies) to quest after—once he’s matured and advanced in his outlaw skills, of course.
As I stated above, the strongest elements of Stone Junction revolve around Daniel’s adventures and training. (His time on the poker circuit with Bad Bobby Sloane is a particular highlight.) Dodge transmogrifies the raw material of American Weirdo Mythos into new inventions, zany recapitulations of occult outlaw fables.
Dodge’s prose style, while effective in its descriptions of characters, cannot quite approach the register of his imaginative inventory. The novel relies heavily on exposition, and while major characters like Volta and Bad Bobby Sloane speak with authentic and differentiated voices, a monolingual sameiness pervades too much of the prose. In its strongest moments, Stone Junction reads like a YA Pynchon novel; in its weakest moments, it reminded me of Tom Robbins.
The stronger moments prevail, however—Stone Junction is a fun, flighty, and at times unexpectedly heavy summer read. The novel might also be read in (stoned) conjunction with Pynchon’s 1990 twin Vineland. Both novels diagnose the fallout of the 1960s counterculture wave crashing against the Reagan eighties; both seem attempts to, at least in the world of letters, check the burgeoning nostalgic romanticization of that turbulent decade. Pynchon’s is the more flawed, sillier, and better-written effort; Dodge’s is likely his magnum opus.
If I’ve namechecked Pynchon too much in my review, forgive me: His name is on the cover of Jim Dodge’s novel, and his own (far more-detailed, far better-written) review precedes Jim Dodge’s novel, and his endorsement is frankly the reason I sought it out to begin with. I called Stone Junction “YA Pynchon” above, but I didn’t mean it as an insult—it’s YA in an older sense, in the sense of the novels handed me when I was young, hardly adult, novels that etched their own versions of reality onto our own banal reality; realities more real: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, Hatchet… Stone Junction is about youth, but it’s also about maturation, and the ache and melancholy of aging out of the game, personified in the semi-tragic figure of Daniel’s would-be mentor, Volta.
I don’t think I would’ve appreciated the depth of Volta’s melancholy as a much younger person, which is the time I wished I had first read Stone Junction. I should’ve found the novel almost 30 years ago—let’s say the summer I stayed in my cousin’s old bedroom. I was fifteen or sixteen, and he, a decade older than me, was doing Adult Things. I listened to the tapes and records he had left in his high school bedroom, taking a few with me at the end of the summer. (Tripp, if you’re reading, I still have your cassette of New Order’s Low-Life in a box somewhere. Drive up sometime and we can search it out together.) I read almost all of his cheap paperbacks, and took as many as I thought I could reasonably get away with with me: Fear and Loathing, Cat’s Cradle, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, both Miller Tropic novels, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Dharma Bums, Delta of Venus, The Beautiful and the Damned. That would’ve been the perfect summer for me to first read Stone Junction, but I didn’t read it then. I read it now. Let a younger person in your life steal it from you, sooner rather than later.
Biblioklept 