Stone Junction

Stone Junction by Jim Dodge

Stone Junction invites counter-culture comparisons, singing as it does a flipside requiem for everything beautiful that came out of American subculture, from the Wild West to the present day, but paying special homage to the hit-the-road-and-don’t-stop freneticism of the Beat Generation and the spirit-quest-or-die narcotic prose of the late sixties and seventies. So: Stone Junction is like every amazing war story you ever heard, at every amazing party you ever went to, from every hip cat that you ached, just ached, to be like, and of whom you never saw the dark side to taint the beauty of everything you thought you learned. Stone Junction reminds you that the world keeps going and going everywhere you look, that “the mind is the shadow of the light that it seeks,” and that there are enough road warriors, Boy Poets and mountain visionaries out there for you to stumble across one if you keep travelling hard and fast enough.

This book does not simply rely, however, on the fast-burning sentiment of rock-and-roll and the stories that it births. Dodge’s writing is breathless, direct and profane, but always beautifully balanced and candid. The multiple shifts in voice and cadence are handled effortlessly, allowing the reader to flit between psychological and spiritual discussion, punchy, stichomythic and occasionally deliberately puerile dialogue, and roustabout description without ever feeling dislocated or lost. Jenny Raine cocks a laconic eyebrow at such changes (“Am I to take this radical change in diction and voice as an indication of candour?”), but Dodge does a good job of letting his characters speak for him without making them puppets (it takes nearly 400 pages to elicit that remark, although it has doubtless been on the reader’s mind a good deal longer). We are taught without being talked down to, kept at a breakneck pace without being pushed, always understanding without needing our hands held. One wonders if there is a story or subject Dodge cannot make his prose fit, such is the ease with which he turns myriad styles and tones to his own usage.   

In his occasional protagonist Daniel Pearse, Jim Dodge has created the ultimate literary subversive: born to the world’s most self-aware teenage tearaway, taught from birth by a ludicrously varied but sublimely drawn and rounded range of magicians, thieves, terrorists and gamblers, Daniel is finally imbued with the spiritual self-actualization to vanish from the material trappings of the universe (this is less a spoiler than one might imagine). That Daniel’s characterization does not vanish with his physical form is testament both to Dodge’s boisterous but sensitive prose, and to the care and time taken to establish Daniel’s development as a shaman and as a man. Daniel appears on the page as a newborn and leaves it as only a young man and the time in between is examined thoroughly, sometimes at the expense of pacing. Dodge seems to have so many stories to tell, so many inflammatory rebels with which to dazzle us, that the central narrative of Daniel’s development seems to sometimes lack momentum. This is not to say that Daniel’s story is not fascinating, bizarre, hilarious and occasionally very sad, only that the subcast of dreamers and prophets around which Dodge hangs his narrative are sometimes too big for the story to hold.

In fact, it seems like perhaps the story itself is too big for the spine to contain. The pacing of the central narrative – lugubrious elsewhere – increases dramatically after Daniel’s spectacular theft of the book’s MacGuffin. The cast of glittering outlaws keeps getting bigger but by now it seems that there is simply not enough time to explore these characters with the same depth and affection Dodge has devoted to those that preceded them. Comparatively minor characters from the books early stages – for example the drug-addled but sense-talking hedonist Mott – elicit more pagetime than some of the key players in the book, among them the seemingly significant but underused escapee Jenny Raine. The savage Debritto is introduced too late to be a truly useful villain (a reader needs time to build the inverted affection for a baddie that will make their eventual destruction cathartic), and even the magnificently damaged revolutionary Volta’s presence is somewhat staccato.

Stone Junction asks big, important questions, and seems like it might deliver the answers in a manner that will stick with you always, but in the end it seems that there is just too much for Dodge to address. Daniel’s bizarre sexual peccadillo is humorously explored but never explained, and his eventual fate is just obtuse enough to leave the reader frustrated: something important has happened, something we want to understand but are unable. Stone Junction feels like it is making a promise, a promise to reveal something fundamental, and while what the reader takes away spiritually from the novel is certainly not Jim Dodge’s responsibility, his caginess in regards to certain important events is sure to leave many bewildered, if not necessarily dissatisfied.  

     

Stone Junction is a sublimely written, incredibly compelling and fantastically imaginative novel. Its only flaw is that it fails to quite deliver on its sense of scale, and when a book is talking primarily about the way we perceive reality and our own place and happiness within it is difficult to begrudge Dodge this. To finish with a final nonconformist comparison, Stone Junction is like the drug-related vision quests and realisations it contains: while you are reading you get the sense of something larger than yourself, a sense of understanding beyond yourself, but when the comedown hits that understanding fades, leaving a memory that is too fragmented to be communicated.