[A Hall of Mirrors] provides a profound and disquieting vision of contemporary American society and possible responses to that society. A measure of the artistic success of the novel is the fact that Stone's themes inhere in every aspect of the novel. Recurring images and metaphors, for example, develop the main themes and provide a convenient way to examine and classify the chief characters.

Many writers, Hawthorne and Camus among others, have warned of the dangers of detachment, the sin of isolation, of how it atrophies one's heart and destroys one's humanity. Stone, however, goes beyond this theme by undercutting the alternative. Detachment, or coolness, in his world, is the only way to survive. Involvement inevitably brings madness and a futile, usually violent, death. The moral values are the same as those of the earlier writers, so that the theme becomes the immorality of survival, the wickedness of...