Stone’s first novel is harrowing portrait of America on the utter edge of despair and destruction. This is surreal American poetry of unease; which has been compared to Lowry (the chemical addled rants and prophetic visions), Conrad (the “Hollow Men” Reinhardt and Sailor Farley), Nathaniel West (the deranged riot echoes the ending of Day of the Locust), and Chandler. Set in a Jim Crow era New Orleans (recast as a hell out of Bosch or Dante), but its unholy vision of conservative talk radio, fals...

I need to reread this early novel by Stone. Read it while in college.As best I recall, Stone essentially predicts the coming of Right Wing wacko radio station formats.I recall being quite fond of this novel.

I've been hearing for years about what a great writer Robert Stone is/was so I decided to read this, his first novel. I have to say that I was completely disappointed and underwhelmed. I'm not even sure about the three stars, but I'll leave it that way for now. There are three main characters, an alcoholic disc-jockey, a girl who's face was slashed with an oyster pick (I didn't know there was such a thing), and a guy who completes surveys with welfare recipients. All three of these people end up...

It's just ridiculous for a first novel to be this good. Yes, it sometimes wanders off into purple Beatness (which was one of the things I loved when I first read it way back when, and less so now) but it's still so rich and earthy and funny, and even when the humor is mean, there's a compassion to it that Stone didn't always bring to his later books. Rheinhardt is the kind of smart bitter wastrel that Stone has written about a lot and he's very good at writing that kind of dialogue (I still crac...

I am a fan of Robert Stone. I have previously read Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and Dog Soldiers. I marveled at his ability to connect confusing sequences of scenes and events, where the only one with a clear understanding of what was going on was possibly a character somewhere off stage. The reader and most of the characters had to find their way through the murk or fog using only bits and pieces of the puzzle. None of the characters were unblemished or unbruised by the events; instead, it seemed...

Just a quick ramble on this book as I think that is all I am going to be capable of: Now, what to say? What to say? This is not a badly written book. It is, however, a depressing book. I feel like I read this through a drunken stupor, because that is largely the point of view through which we read (so much cheap liquor). A frustratingly race-baiting, fear mongering, divisive (and political by the end) story line that seems intent on upsetting (and it is soooo successful). Having finished this bo...

3.5 stars. Compelling for its insightful portrait of extreme right-wing politics, showing the complex and sophisticated ways businessmen harness issues of welfare, race, patriotism, and religion to dupe an under-educated populace and magnify their hateful messages using talk radio. Written in 1964, this must have seemed brazenly cynical and paranoid at the time, but now it reads like a practical playbook for how things are done. There are brilliant set pieces full of dark comedy and the surreal

So crazy, so wild, gritty and fun. Highly recommended for all Stone fans or anyone who enjoys that nebulous sub genre called "literary thriller." The surprising thing about it is its year of publication, 1968. It's about a right wing, racist uprising in New Orleans, and damned if the dialog and various speeches don't seem to come straight out of yesterday's report from Fox News. Nothing has changed in this country, concerning race, for the last fifty years. This novel is proof of that.

First Stone novel. It's all there, all the things we would come to love about this author. Eerily relevant to today. Timeless. Stayed up until 2am to finish it.

Bang average

Set in mid-Sixties New Orleans, chillingly prescient about the forces that led both to the end of decade chaos and, even more eerily, the forces that would unfold around the 2016 election. The protagonist's name is Rheinhardt--pretty clearly a gesture to Ralph Ellison's protean hustler in Invisible Man. The Walpurgisnacht of Part 3 is particularly powerful.A quote to suggest the flavor:"The voice were closer now so that he knew suddenly what it was he hard and how the light could be so clear. It...

I like the idea of this novel but Robert stone doesn't carry it off. I read it several years ago but remember it as a weird cross Hemingway/Mailer's tough guy poses and Faulkner's southern decadence and meandering sentences. All his suggestive ambiguity which with Faulkner's best takes you someplace but at his worst seems a lot like "A Hall of Mirrors" I liked Stone's Dog Soldiers much better. The dialogue is funny and creepy and the characterizations seem spot on. Read that one instead.

"The California of the mind.'' Great laundromat scene. Prescient takes on right wing ravers and racial politics at their most extreme. Mr. Stone's first published novel and he's in fine form here. No one like him. And the ending is heartbreaking.

12th book of 2022Unsurprisingly, A Hall of Mirrors was a required course reading for a university class. The twelfth of the semester, and a doozy. The back cover of A Hall of Mirrors promises to be a surrealist tale of right-wing politics, Christian fundamentalism, and drifters, and I guess I have far too much experience with right-wing politics and Christian fundamentalism - believe me, I actually do. It’s disgusting. - because I thought right-wing politics and Christian fundamentalism played a...

Haven't yet decided how I feel about this book, but I'm glad I read it. It can definitely go on for a while, but there are enough little gems scattered throughout the book to make it a worthwhile read.The writing is definitely the best part of the book. Pretty much all of my favorite parts were conversations that sort of throw the many political and social viewpoints in the book against one another. Rainey and the bartender talking about the Big Store, Rheinhardt and Rainey's philosophical discu...

Wow, this book (my first by Robert Stone) appealed to the part of me that likes Hunter Thompson for this surely is a tale told in the Gonzo style, offering a hip, grim, violent take on ugly side of American culture in the 1960s. The story is about a drunkard DJ who wears a God & Country (& Whites) First hat at the conservative radio station WUSA even though he doesn't really seem to be committed to any beliefs, political, religious or otherwise; his white trash girlfriend who is on the run from

I'm glad I didn't read this one first. While Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise are two of my favorite books, Robert Stone's first novel shows how hard it is to write like Robert Stone. Very sloppy, very long and highly undeveloped, this treatise on activism in the 60's (or is it a limp satire on southern culture) was illegible at times. He tried so hard to make his main characters hippies and scammers and racists that pages would go by and the reader would have no idea what Stone was talking a...

Robert Stone's "Hall of Mirrors" left a sour taste in my mouth. An on-the-scene look at the sinister side of right-wing politics, it presents the resurrection of Southern white supremacy in a jaded, deadpan manner that reads like Pynchonesque prose only feigning dark humor. His protagonist, a drunk clarinetist who becomes a proselytizing radio DJ without any conscience, is a two-bit imitation of a noir antihero while his girlfriend, a damaged blonde (of course), appears to be working with half a...

A crazily insane novel of early 60s (1963) New Orleans, capturing time and place through a variety of characters, both locals and transients. The locals include the racist owner of a right-wing radio station, who arranges a Bircher-Klan-type stadium rally, and a black café owner and landlord whose African American tenants are the target audience of a survey from the welfare department. The transients include an alcoholic ex-musician who lands a job at the radio station, a young woman from West V...

[SPOILERS] After "Dog Soldiers", one of my favorite books of all time, I was hungry for more. Unfortunately, this first work by Stone is a bit disappointing. It starts off well, interesting down on their luck characters that have their own ways to deal with the oppressive system. I think it could have done without the last third of the book (the whole stadium scene is too improbable) and have more fleshed out characters, especially Geraldine. Thankfully, Stone learned from this effort and improv...

A first novel full of big ideas that never really congeals into a cohesive narrative, with a bit too much time squandered on inane philosophical conversations between annoying beatniks/hippies/whatever you want to call them. Some of the characters are simply too much of a stretch to believe at all, but Stone's violent climax in a city on the brink of explosion mostly works and foreshadows his masterpieces, Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, still to come.

There isn't a 4 1/2 stars, so I gave it five. The beginning is a little rocky, and I guess that's a sign that it is a first novel. There were a few parts throughout the book that were a little strange, and Robert Stone's experimentation is unusual.Still, the book is straightforward for the most part. It's sad. It's good.

Hall of Mirrors is a surreal nightmare of. racism, political corruption, and troubled relationships in 1960s New Orleans.

The last 100 pages of Stone's first novel run into a riot straight out of a Dylan song. Strong 1st book that really set the table for Stone, who got better and better.

How’d Stone anticipate Trump rallies 45 years in advance?

I read the first half in one sitting, then read the second half in one sitting which takes about a 90 degree turn from the novel I thought it was.

A good book. A good first book. It does have a few slow parts like every book but you have to get through them and enjoy the over all story.

I remembered reading a story by Stone in college that felt right. I read it a few more times. Then I somehow forgot Stone's name when I wanted to read something else he'd written. Browsing in Browser Books recently his name appeared in my mind and I found the story in a collection next to this book on a shelf. A HALL OF MIRRORS will now sit next to THE MOVIEGOER by Percy, but I don't know exactly if it goes there. It has a different effect, it's flashier somehow. It's the 60's and you know it, b...

Wonderful portrait of New Orleans and the entire Southern mood in the early 60s. A must-read for anyone who has been to New Orleans or wants a view of the civil rights turmoil that goes beyond the flashpoints in Selma and Montgomery.

File with Last Exit to Brooklyn (last chance to turn around).