[In the following review, Caldwell praises Outerbridge Reach, commending Stone's moral concerns but citing weaknesses in the novel's narrative structure.]

Robert Stone's characters have cleaned up their act in the last two decades. In his National Book Award—winning Dog Soldiers (1974), for example, they worried about what routes to take to smuggle heroin out of Vietnam, how many Dilaudids to pop for breakfast, and what kind of automatic weaponry to bring to meet the police. In his newest book, Outerbridge Reach, they worry about prep-school tuition, the ozone layer, and how to cover margin when the Dow drops fifty points.

Owen Browne (Annapolis '68), Mr. Stone's latest hero, is, as one associate puts it, “clean cut but serious. Serious but not weird.” He fought bravely and proudly in Vietnam along with his friends, the “last good children of their time,” and made a successful life for himself. He writes ad copy for a yacht company, sails in his free time, knows “Dover Beach” by heart, loves Melville and Elgar, and subscribes to The American Spectator.

Yet Browne is weary, on the wagon, and in mid-midlife crisis as the book opens. His marriage is under strain, if solid, and he is beginning to feel something of a nostalgia for Vietnam, where danger imposed a code of conduct and values that was ultimately liberating. Without that imperative, Browne is adrift, and beset by a consuming and nameless dread. Jokes and accidents bring it home: it is a “fear of failing from the inside out.”

Matty Hylan, who—like Godot or, more to the point, God—never appears in the book, offers Browne a way out. Hylan, the owner of the yacht company Browne works for, a “millionaire vulgarian in the contemporary mode,” is heading toward Chapter 11 by chapter 6, and disappears in a Maxwellian shroud of mystery. When he drops out of a solo around-the-world yacht race, Browne volunteers to replace him.

In a recent interview, Mr. Stone recalled the first sentence of the Blue-Jackets' Manual he used in the Navy in the 1950s: “The sea isn't inherently dangerous, but it is unforgiving.” Too unforgiving to be faced by oneself. And Browne, with no company on his voyage but the broadcasts of a blind South African Morse-code hobbyist (“repeat zulu 1800 description playboy centerfold august 1989 over”) and an English short-wave evangelist (“Are you a covenant keeper or a covenant breaker? … How lovely it would be if all our listeners were covenant keepers”), is out of humanity's reach: he must finish his journey alone.

It's difficult to pull off the story of a solitary journey, and Mr. Stone doesn't quite. The book cleaves uncomfortably in two: one part on the preparations for the race, one on the race itself. His technique of introducing characters obliquely and bringing them together in explosive situations is less dramatic here than in his other books: Browne is too remote for the second half, and the carryings-on of his wife and associates an ocean away seem less a part of his quixotic journey than a running postmodern counterpoint to it. This is not to mention the difficulties inherent in writing a philosophical novel about honor and truth when “the world [is] no longer safe for good manners.”

Yet no author writing today has a better understanding of the grey area where human desire and ambition meet ineluctable circumstance, and none has a better claim to be taken seriously as a moralist. Browne's ruminations on board take on a relentless logic, albeit a convoluted, hallucinatory, and suicidal one. His obsession—and the problem for all of Mr. Stone's characters—is how to make moral choices when one is unsure of what one believes, how to act decisively before all the facts are in. It is a particularly American obsession, this craving for codes of conduct. And those familiar with Mr. Stone's other books will recognize it as the goad that pushes his characters into Zen, astrology, Alcoholics Anonymous, auspication, and radical ideologies. It also leads them into rash and blind acts of escapism; not just booze and drugs but also Converse's decision to smuggle heroin in Dog Soldiers, and Holliwell's Central American cloak-and-dagger work in A Flag for Sunrise.

Even Ron Strickland, the glib documentary filmmaker ready to cut through any dogma and knock anyone off his moral high horse, is blind. Convinced the world is on the make, and intimate with whores and other lowlife, he is unimpressed by the “idealism” of the aid workers who travel to Nicaragua to sleep with Sandinista leaders. He is impatient with his left-wing assistant, who thinks Annapolis looks “fascist.” (“I don't find this place particularly fascist. … The Guggenheim Museum is fascist. This is about something else.”) He sees through the heroism and poetry of Browne's quest to its pathos and escapism. Yet when Strickland falls in love with Browne's wife, Anne, it becomes clear that there is a hole in his heart where something else should be, and that that something else is the kind of “traditional” loyalty in love that the Navy and marriage have taught Browne:

The trouble was, Strickland decided, that his work was too much like things. People required their illusions. … On the other hand, he thought, perhaps that was not the problem. Perhaps the trouble was that things had some aspect he could not perceive. … The other aspect of things might be routinely visible to the average a— in the street.

When Strickland tries to convince Anne to run off with him in her husband's absence, she leans on that “routinely visible aspect” and offers a refusal straight out of Beckett:

“We have to go on living,” Strickland said. “Remember that.”

She agreed absolutely. Somehow, she thought, he failed to understand that this was the problem.