Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone

First published: 1992

Type of plot: Adventure

Time of work: The 1990’s

Locale: Connecticut; New York City; the yacht Nona in the South Atlantic

Principal Characters:

• Owen Browne, the protagonist, a man seeking to reaffirm his manhood, lost youth and lost dreams
• Anne Browne, Owen’s wife of twenty years, still in love but disturbed by his changes and fascinated by Strickland
• Maggie Browne, the Brownes’ teenage daughter
• Ron Strickland, a documentary filmmaker engaged to record Browne’s round-the-world sailing adventure
• Pamela Koestler, Strickland’s prostitute girlfriend and film subject
• Harry Thorne, an honest businessman half in love with Anne
• Mad Max, a ham-radio operator, Owen’s human connection for much of his voyage

The Novel

Building on his knowledge of the sea gleaned as a member of the U.S. Navy, a merchant marine seaman, and a yachtsman, Robert Stone in Outerbridge Reach tells an exciting but disturbing story of the challenges of transoceanic yachting, the heights and depths of human daring, the class conflicts beneath democratic façades, and the difficulty of fully understanding the behavior and motivations of others. The book is also a story of betrayal: of self, of family, of personal and corporate dreams.

The novel begins with Owen Browne testing a forty-five-foot Altan Marine sloop and having trouble with failing parts. Such weaknesses, the result of cutting corners and substituting cheap, unreliable materials for solid craftsmanship, will later prove his undoing on the long sea voyage he ultimately undertakes. He is inexperienced and uncomfortable at sea. Nevertheless, when the Hylan Corporation’s head executive mysteriously disappears and therefore will not represent Altan in an around-the-world one-man yacht race, Owen decides to fill the gap, advertise the Altan product, and possibly win the race. Although he is undertaking a foolhardy venture, he convinces himself that this is the only way to regain his lost sense of self, the youthful self-awareness and self-pride of his military days. His wife, a far better sailor than he, doubts his ability to make the stressful voyage but supports his venture in hope that it will help him to regain the vigor and confidence of their early marriage. Superficially a perfect couple, they are estranged and drifting apart. Owen’s humble origins have kept him far more aware of the class distinctions of the yachting crowd than she. The Brownes’ daughter sees her parents’ deception of self and spouse and refuses to bless the farcical voyage, avoiding her father, refusing to see him off, and escaping telephone calls during the voyage—yet weeping for him. Owen, in turn, reveals ineffectiveness with the cabinetmaker and others hired to prepare his boat. Harry Thorne and his colleagues, the behind-the-scene movers considering how to save the sinking parent company, decide that Owen is the only Altan representative worth saving and give his voyage the go-ahead.

Before Owen leaves, he is interviewed and filmed by a mean-spirited, embittered, but clearly talented filmmaker, Ron Strickland, who is hired by Thorne to record the preparation for the voyage, set up cameras for Owen to self-record his adventures, and turn the whole into an advertisement for Altan yachts. Strickland, however, has other film goals. A cynical, professional skeptic whose films destroy their subjects’ pretensions, he sees Owen epitomizing the self-deluding officer class he had earlier satirized in a film about the Vietnam War. He plans to expose the upper-middle-class emptiness of Owen’s family life, social position, and self. The novel alternates between the Brownes and Strickland; the former are led to believe in his objectivity, while conversations between Strickland and his former film subject, Pamela Koestler, a prostitute and drug user, reveal the real, destructive effect of the scenes. Strickland also becomes sexually obsessed with Anne Browne and determined to break through her upper-middle-class façade. While Owen is at sea, Strickland finally seduces and falls in love with her. His love for her and her betrayal of Owen make Strickland see Owen in a new light, and his sense of his film begins to change. She, in turn, feels that she cannot telephone Owen at sea and as a result never speaks to him again, although she works hard to maintain the role of devoted wife.

In the meantime, at sea Owen faces repeated problems (including a lockjaw scare). Yet he falls into the rhythms of the sea and gains confidence and strength. Missionary programs enacting biblical stories, especially ones related to betrayals and concealment, and Morse-code communication with a blind South African adolescent, Mad Max, give Owen human contact. Thoughts of the boy’s darkness make Owen think of the whole world in hiding, concealed and concealing. He and his ship Nona lead the race until furious driving rain and winds off Argentina reveal the internal flaws of his craft: plastic instead of wood and a failing mast. When Owen realizes the dangerous deception of his cherished advertising copy and his inability to complete the voyage because of his faulty ship, he anchors off a small South Atlantic island and goes ashore. The bleached bones of whales and the haunted house of nineteenth century whalers make for an eerily surreal, hallucinatory experience.

By the time Owen renews his journey, he has opted for deception. Because of satellite transmission difficulties, the Nona is no longer trackable, so Owen begins a devious course of misleading reports of distances covered to make those back home think he is still ahead of the race when, in fact, he is almost motionless in the water. He prepares two sets of nautical logs, one truthful, the other a fiction. Yet he realizes that “he could no more take a prize by subterfuge than he could sail to the white port city of his dreams” and that the strange confusions of Vietnam, where truth had been “a trick of the mind that confounded logic,” continue. Employing “instruments of rectitude” such as compass, sextant, and rule to lie, he concludes, would “erode the heart and soul.” He decides that there is no way out, that “there would always be something to conceal.” After a final entry in his log, he steps overboard; as his ship sails on, he drowns.

When his deception and fate are discovered, the world rejects Owen as a cheat. Only Strickland sees into the heart of the matter and understands his basic honesty. This insight drives Strickland to try to make a film to restore Owen’s reputation, but ironically, Anne and her company protectors steal back from him everything he could have used to redeem Owen. Only too late does Anne understand what Strickland could have shown the world: a man doing his best to meet the larger challenges of life but continually defeated, not by a lack of inner drive but by social concealment and deception that encompass everything from his boat to his own wife and daughter. Harry Thorne, the sponsor of Owen’s voyage, one of the few honest men in the company, concludes that his trust has been misplaced. The novel ends with Anne considering making the voyage her husband failed and writing a novel about it.

The Characters

An Annapolis graduate and Vietnam veteran, Owen Browne was one of the golden boys of his generation. For him, the war years were the best years of his life, a time of excitement and danger but also of intense commitment, clear-cut purposes and loyalties, and a daily challenging of self physically, psychologically, and intellectually. Everything has been downhill since. He resigned his Navy commission to write advertising copy for a yacht brokerage in Connecticut. Though he excels at sales and copy, he has lost his self-respect and the respect of his wife and daughter. He feels estranged, isolated, discontent. Browne sees the round-the-world yacht race as an opportunity to experience the excitement and danger of his wartime years and to regain his self-respect. His inexperience sailing the high seas alone does not diminish his desire to do so.

Anne Browne, a lovely, intelligent woman from a wealthy nautical family, has been faithful but is hurt and disturbed by an unfulfilling sex life and by Owen’s psychological distance from her; she longs to recapture the love of their youth. A successful, serious writer, she feels contempt for his advertising career. Though not convinced Owen can survive the voyage, she does nothing to stop him. Anne is trapped between loyalty to her husband and the fierce, fascinating sexuality of Strickland’s continued and insistent attentions. Strickland’s intensity, his driving sensuality, the sense he communicates of being on the edge, of dealing with harsh realities, both attract and repel Anne, and she ultimately succumbs. Yet she worries about appearances and proprieties; she is strong enough to reject Strickland when she thinks Owen is returning, and she later agrees to his being robbed and mugged to prevent him from finishing his film about her husband. She is a survivor who recoups financially at the end and who toys with redemption through repeating Owen’s maritime struggle. When she reads a romantic quotation she had included in her final, unsent note to Owen, she cannot imagine the person she had been.

Maggie Browne, the teenage daughter of Anne and Owen, is a silent presence throughout, fearful, pouting, embarrassed, refusing to acknowledge her father’s affection, but deeply loving him. She takes after Owen both physically and in her upright sense of character and fortitude. She is embarrassed and disappointed by his pretenses and lies and is heartbroken at his demise.

Ron Strickland is central to the testing of and understanding of Owen and Anne. He is an aging, embittered hipster filmmaker, obsessed by the Vietnam War, instinctively detecting pretense, hypocrisy, and human foibles. He prides himself on being able to see through “uptight” manners and find the core of darkness. Yet he is also an artist who can capture on celluloid the essence of the human condition, twisted and weak but somehow also pathetic and worthy of sympathy. He begins his film with the idea of tearing down the Browne family and showing the emptiness, fakery, and hypocrisy of their inner selves, but he ends up falling in love with Anne, admiring the innocence and vulnerability of Maggie, and vowing to do everything necessary to redeem Owen, to restore his honor by showing the integrity behind his lies and death.

Pamela Koestler, the star of one of Strickland’s films, accompanies him during much of the filming. In fact, Strickland delights in introducing a kinky degenerate into the homes of what he considers “uptight” puritanical types. Pamela feels comfortable with Strickland’s obsessions. Through her, readers see his darkest side.

Critical Context

The excited reception of Outerbridge Reach suggests that many critics considered Robert Stone America’s leading novelist, at least in the arena of the “big issue” novel that takes up the moral problems of the age. After a brilliant beginning to his career with Hall of Mirrors (1967) and Dog Soldiers (1974), his A Flag for Sunrise (1981) and Children of Light (1986) left some enthusiasts disappointed and hopeful that a new novel in the man-against-the-sea tradition would have substance enough to carry the weight of Stone’s themes. Critics in general seem to feel this hope was justified, and while Stone has been criticized for windiness, he has also been praised for his balance—counterweighting his customary social deviants with citizens solid to a fault— his lively and interesting prose, his evocation of place, and his masterful plotting of doomed relationships. Thus Outerbridge Reach gave new hope that a mature Stone would deliver the crowning works his youth promised, and that this sensitive recorder of the 1960’s generation’s angst and fears would produce new surprises and insights in coming years.

Bibliography

Bloom, James, D. “Cultural Capital and Contrarian Investing: Robert Stone, Thom Jones, and Others.” Contemporary Literature 36 (Fall, 1995): 490-507. Presents a critical appreciation of Stone’s Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach. Bloom examines the setting and story outline of Outerbridge Reach, as well as the narrative techniques of both novels. He also criticizes the apparent decay in standards relating to poetry, art, and culture.

Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “A Good Novelist’s Glum Cruise.” Newsweek 119 (February 24, 1992): 69. Jones believes Stone’s great themes, convincing characters, and scenes “as sharp as rusty fishhooks” are marred by attempts to imitate the moral dramas of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Outerbridge Reach, Jones writes, is best when Owen is fighting off insects, haunted by icebergs, beset by fervent radio preachers, and undone by sloppy craftsmanship that turns his boat into a coffin.

Leonard, John. “Leviathan.” The Nation 254 (April 13, 1992): 489-494. Leonard notes some of the literary influences that seem to “hover” over Stone’s novel, including Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. He sees the novel as reflective of a spiritual quest and says, “Like Ahab, Stone hounds God—-and discovers his absence.”

Pritchard, William H. “Sailing Over the Edge.” The New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1992, pp. 1, 21, 22. Pritchard finds Stone’s usual preoccupation with the underside of American life toned down in Outerbridge Reach, though Strickland, with his ability to penetrate to the false heart of pretentiousness and to expose ideals as trumpery, is typical Stone. Allusions to Melville, William Shakespeare, and nineteenth century poems add depth and irony, while the symbol of Outerbridge Reach “reaches further and deeper than anyone could have thought.”

Stone, Robert. “The Genesis of Outerbridge Reach.” The Times Literary Supplement, June 5, 1992, p. 14. Stone discusses the degree to which he based his story on personal experiences sailing in the Antarctic regions. He also describes the historical case of David Crowhurst, who decided not to sail around the world but to claim that he had.

Stone, Robert. Interview by David Pink and Chuck Lewis. Salmagundi 108 (Fall, 1995): 119-139. The interviewers question Stone about the ways in which he kills off the characters in his novels, the “Stonian” universe, and his experiences as a writer. Useful for gaining a better understanding of the influences that shape Stone’s writing.

Sutherland, John. “In Dangerous Waters.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 1992, p. 28. Sutherland places Outerbridge Reach in the tradition of Stone’s other fiction, discusses his Navy and sailing experiences, and tendentiously considers the degree to which Crowhurst and others influenced Stone.

Weber, Bruce. “An Eye for Danger.” The New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1992, pp. 6, 19-24. Weber summarizes Stone’s life, including his friendships and adventures with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, his canon, the influence of Samuel Beckett, the serendipity of some Stone characters, the influence of the Crowhurst story, and Stone’s spiritual quest as he studies perplexed men unsure of right.