Robert Stone, “Fun With
Problems: Stories,” Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24.00
3/9/10
Though one of our prose
masters, Robert Stone is less acknowledged than he ought to be. That may be
because his characters repeatedly court or are caught up in dangerous
situations, often pertaining to war, sexual obsession or drugs, which may lead
him to be downgraded as a genre writer. The more likely reason for his relative
obscurity is that in the United States today any but the most obviously Nobel
Prize worthy writer — perhaps only Phillip Roth, since John Updike is dead
— has a hard time getting full credit. Our taste tends away from real
writing toward colostomy bags in literary form penned by the likes of Dan
Brown.
But back to Stone. “Dog
Soldiers” (1974) — well served by the film, “Who'll Stop the Rain”, starring Nick Nolte — and “Outerbridge Reach”
(1992), are his best novels. His memoir, "Prime Green: Remembering the
Sixties” (2006), wouldn’t be a bad place to start getting to know him either,
since it contains many of his lifelong concerns, including Vietnam, drugs,
physical and psychological edge play, ocean, irony, and varying shades of
disappointment.
