Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

Robert Stone, a former teacher at Princeton University, was a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. His book is a reflection not the “the sixties” but of that narrow spectrum – the more glitzy, media-hyped portion – he experienced.  Although he claims in the epilogue to the book that his generation destroyed “the letter of the laws of racism and sexual discrimination,” he himself did not participate in those revolutions and gives only passing notice to the Civil Rights and social justice movements of the day.

Kesey apparently nicknamed him “The Paranoid.” My characterization might be “The Shirttail Rider.” Stone rode into fiction on Hemingway and Kerouac’s laurels. He was frequently beholden to his wife for survival. He ventured into Vietnam on the coattails of an earlier stint in the Navy to become a stringer, reporting not on the atrocities of war, but on bars and rock concerts. One understands the soldiers who yelled at him, “You don’t have to be here, you’re here to make money off it… you’re here because you eat this shit up, don’t you?” 

Comparing Prime Green to Tom Wolfe’s classic Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test can be instructive in terms of point of view and the distinction between reportage and personal essay. A master of “the new journalism,” Wolfe tells the Merry Pranksters’ story as an outside observer with an omniscient point of view. As a Prankster, Stone’s version is partial and subjective.

Stone moves fluidly between fact and fiction with no concern for making distinctions. Memoirs such as his are what give this genre a bad name. That said, there are patches of lucid, beautiful writing in Prime Green. “We wanted it all; sometimes we confused self-destructiveness with virtue and talent, obliteration with ecstasy, heedlessness with courage. Worshipping the doctrines of Hemingway as we did, we wanted constant grace under constant pressure, and stoicism before a disillusionment that somehow never went stale.”