Stone's cold world

A new set of stories spanning the career of one of our greatest novelists tells of the vanity and futility that is life

by Jordan Ellenberg

BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER, by Robert Stone. Houghton Mifflin, 222 pages, $24.

In Robert Stone's story "Under the Pitons," Blessington, a chef-cum-drug runner, realizes too late that he's made a small mistake. He and his fellow smugglers have gone for a Caribbean swim without lowering the ladder from their deck, and there's no way back on board. His hand on the hull of his boat, he might as well be in the open ocean. Despite the tropical setting, I couldn't read this story without thinking of the Yukon -- Jack London's Yukon, in "To Build a Fire," where a logger builds his fire a bit too close to a snow-clogged tree, and suffers the consequences. Once the fire goes out, he keeps struggling; but he knows he's a dead man who happens for the moment to be breathing, to be running toward the distant camp. For Robert Stone, life's like that. You're dying all along. Occasionally some circumstance intervenes to make you realize that before the breathing stops. You cross over, and for a long moment you're both dead and alive.

Stone is the author of five novels, most recently Outerbridge Reach (1992), which merged nautical adventure, hallucinatory revelation, and contemplation of the declining Anglo-Saxon elite; it rode bestseller lists even as it indicted a culture conditioned by publicity. Stone has always been concerned with death, and with the vain stratagems customarily brought to bear against it; in each of his novels he has warred against a world he sees as mostly sin and folly. But none of his previous books deploys the merciless force of the seven stories, spanning his whole career, collected in Bear and His Daughter.

There's nothing in the novels, for instance, to prepare you for Mary Urquhart, the protagonist of "Miserere." Mary is a librarian, long-widowed, long-sobered, in a New Jersey town on its way to becoming a slum. Every so often, after work, instead of going home, she lays some aborted fetuses in the back of her station wagon and drives out to the suburbs to have them blessed by a priest. This is Mary's city:

It was nearly night, though a faint stain of the day persisted. At the western horizon, across the river and over the stacks and gables of the former mills, hung a brilliant patch of clear night sky where Venus blazed. . . . There were patchy reefs and banks of soiled frozen snow on the ground. Not much had fallen for a week, but the weather was bitter and the north-facing curbs and margins were still partly covered.

This is the dead world, where time has stopped; there's no sun, no darkness, and the snow neither falls nor melts.

That sunless sky comes back in story after story. For Elliot, the alcoholic social worker in "Helping," it's the black, smoked-out sky he remembers from Vietnam. Elliot's client, Blankenship, dreams of those skies too -- only he was never there. It's just something he's heard about. "Now," Elliot reflects, "in addition to the poverty, anxiety, and confusion that would always be his life's lot, he had been visited with irony. It was all arbitrary, and some people simply got elected. Everyone knew that who had been where Blankenship had not." Angered, Elliot abandons 18 months of sobriety, then sits home with an apple-juice container full of Scotch and waits until his wife comes home.

"I wish you'd put those skis down in the barn," she told him. "You never use them."

"I always like to think," Elliot said, "that I'll start the morning off skiing."

"Well, you never do," she said. "How long have you been home?"

"Practically just walked in," he said. Her pointing out that he no longer skied in the morning enraged him. "I stopped at the Conway Library to get the new Oxford Classical World. Candace ordered it."

Her look grew troubled. She had caught something in his voice. With dread and bitter satisfaction, Elliot watched his wife detect the smell of whisky.

"Oh God," she said. "I don't believe it."

Let's get it over with, he thought. Let's have the song and dance.

She sat up straight in her chair and looked at him in fear.

"Oh, Chas," she said, "how could you?"

For a moment he was tempted to try to explain it all.

"The fact is," Elliot told his wife, "I hate people who start the day cross- country skiing."

Stone is the greatest playwright among living novelists: he can bring conversation to a pitch that, in other writer's hands, would be melodramatic and forced, and he can keep it there.

He is also a genius of drunkenness, which is portrayed in Bear and His Daughter in every one of its tonalities, from tight thrill to pitiful confusion to morose clarity. Above all, he captures the way alcohol squeezes thought into a slow bubble-up of aphorism. "Fear, anger, and sleep were the three primary conditions of life . . . " Elliot thinks. "Once he had thought fear the worst, but he had learned that the worst was anger. Nothing could fix it, neither alcohol nor medicine. It was a worm. It left him no peace. Sleep was the best." That kind of writing, and the muscular situations Stone favors, get him compared to Hemingway; but really it's only at these moments that the two writers are much alike. They're both in love with the way language folds under pressure. Stone's characters get out of a bottle what Hemingway's need a bull for.

This is not a life-affirming collection. For Stone, sobriety is temporary, just like life; and drinking is an admirable kind of suicide. It represents a recognition of the truth about things. Optimists don't come off well here: they're deluded weaklings, like Mary Urquhart's suburban priest, who likes to quote the medieval mystic Dame Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." When he balks at blessing the fetuses, she demolishes him with a cool, otherworldly fury. You want to call Stone's insistence on the futility and vanity of human life a fault, but you can't -- these stories are too convincing the way they are. A happy ending would seem like a falsehood, like the ending of London's original version of "To Build a Fire," where the logger gets his fire going at last, stumbles back into camp, and forevermore shares with everyone who'll listen the wisdom of the North: "Never travel alone!"

Will Smart, the poet-narrator of the title story, is one of the saddest characters Stone has yet made. A mediocre poet, a weakling, another relapsed drinker, he clings even at the end to Dame Julian's cheerful philosophy. "I'll tell you what," he tells his daughter, both of them high on crystal meth,

I've got through many a night on many a drug. I'll sing to you like I used to. . . . Then it'll be morning, see. We'll hear the birds. The sun'll be up. The drug will be over. We'll have survived.

But in the land of the dead (here played by Nevada) there's no sun and no respite. "Moment by moment," Smart's daughter thinks the next morning, "it was beautiful. Things could only be beautiful that way." It almost seems like a string of hope. But it's not. It's just the same drunk, spongy glee at the broken-up world that Elliot feels as he waits, heart in his throat, for his wife to come home and discover him: "The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment."

Jordan Ellenberg is a writer living in Somerville.