Vietnam, hallucinogenic drugs and varying states of dislocation have always been central to the work of the post-Hemingway New York writer, Robert Stone. Most of his anti-hero central characters can trace their loss of innocence - and of pretty much everything else as well - to their stint in a war their country had no right to be in.
Being "over there" may have messed up their lives, but Stone's Nam veterans are jealously possessive of the experience. Take for example Elliot, a recovering alcoholic counsellor in the famous story "Helping", who finds himself faced with a patient claiming to be haunted by nightmares of Vietnam. "You were never there, my man," counters an irritated Elliot, "You never saw the goddam place. You have no business dreaming about it! You better cut it out!"
Elliot's potentially explosive, slow simmer is fairly characteristic of several of the burnt-out misfits featured in Stone's short fiction collection Bear & His Daughter (Bloomsbury, £15.99 in UK). The seven stories gathered here span some thirty years of a career which began with A Hall of Mirrors (1967), his visionary chronicle of post-Vietnam angst. It is a shame that none of the original publication dates of these stories is included. Most of them, with the exception of the terrifyingly topical "Miserere", have a Seventies feel to them, while "Helping", which has been widely anthologised, featured in The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories, edited by Tobias Wolff, in 1993.
As usual, whenever a American male writer produces a book of short fiction, the late Raymond Carver is mentioned. But Stone has little stylistically in common with Carver. His mentor is undoubtedly Hemingway, but a harsher, blacker version of hemingway, with absurdist variations on Conradian themes.
In his third novel, A Flag For Sunrise (1981), Holliwell, an American anthropologist, arrives in the corrupt Central American republic of Tecan, supposedly to deliver a lecture. Naturally he has already been approached by the CIA. His speech develops into a rambling attack on the United States. Having outraged his audience, Holliwell is later challenged by a young woman, who says: "But isn't this stylised despair an excuse for immorality? Doesn't it explain away all duty? Don't you think your attitudes reflect the decadence of your own society?"
Yet as Stone proved with Outerbridge Reach (1992), for all his muscularity he is capable of a range of shifts in tone, mood and social setting. Owen Browne, the central character in that book, initially appears to be a refugee from Updike territory. Normal, conventionally employed, Browne even has a wife and a suitably rebellious teenage daughter. Unlike Stone's usual anti-hero wasters and misfits awash in booze and ravaged by drugs and nightmares, Browne enjoys sailing, and if he has a personality problem, it is "excessive politeness". However, he moves on to a messier existence. Weary of waiting for greatness to arrive, he decides to take action. As action goes, it is fairly extreme - he decides to sail single-handed around the world. The main problem here is that Browne lacks the necessary skill and so decides to pretend to make the trip.
Though widely praised, Outer bridge Reach takes a long, long time to say its piece. Lacking the eloquence and elegance of Updike, Stone is essentially a businesslike writer, and excessive length has often proved his weakness. It is precisely this tendency to overstay his time which makes what appears to be a deceptively unobtrusive collection so interesting. At least three, possibly four, of the seven are close to being the best of Stone. The title story juxtaposes his ugly but funny humour with a genuine pathos which is brilliantly achieved in a story the outcome of which is never in doubt.
Smart is the bearded poet, now back on the poetry reading circuit, somewhat the worse for wear. "For the past year, Smart had been trying to reconstruct a poem he had written about witnessing the salmon migration in the Tanana River in Central Alaska thirty years before." Watching the fish battle their way back upriver has remained with him. "It seemed to him that he had never witnessed a sight so moving and noble . . ." But having written the poem, Smart promptly lost it and appears to have spent his sober moments since in search of it.
While still fumbling around for his lost poem, Smart remains aware that he is on a mission - he is meeting his park ranger daughter. But he has lost more than his poem. While Dad is clearly a drunk, his little girl is not much better and can't seem to kick her drugs habit. Dressed in her ranger's uniform, Rowan, though employed and living with a decent, concerned character, is not even trying to save herself. "You didn't eat breakfast. You on a fast or something?" asks the boyfriend, "I'm on a fast," she answers, "I require a vision."
As father and daughter are brought ever closer by Smart's shaky progress through the National Park, the poet hazily revisits his past. True, it is not quite conventional nostalgia. "During the Patty Hearst affair, the FBI had hassled him about the whereabouts of Rowan's mother. But at that time he had not known where either of them were . . . The FBI had been interested in him too, back then. His work had been so popular in the Soviet Union . . ." Meanwhile Rowan's boss and one-time sexual partner is despairing of her ability to enforce the peace - and stay off drugs. "I'm trying to protect the public," he says. "Do I have to protect them from you?"
In "Miserere", librarian Mary Urquhart divides her time between reading to children and forcing reluctant priests to baptise aborted babies. Mary of course is another of Stone's drinkers. It is a sharp, tight, menacing story, as shocking as it is controlled. "Helping" is deservedly widely known, not only as an efficient presentation of Stone's themes but for the perfectly balanced stalemate of Elliot's marriage. Again, Stone demonstrates his gift for evoking humorous pathos in the midst of an atmosphere of chaotic displacement. "Your optimism always surprises me," remarks Elliot to his defeated wife. "My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn't optimism."
Few short stories manage the array of twists and turns displayed in "Under the Pitons", as nasty a piece of taut, cinematic thriller writing as one could happen upon. Far more than just the guru of the Vietnam generation, Robert Stone can be very good, and this collection proves it.