[In the following excerpt, McGraw lauds Bear and His Daughter, contending that Stone writes concisely and powerfully in stories containing familiar themes from his novels such as morality and motivation.]

Successful fiction achieves several balancing acts, including the balance of action against reflection, desire against restraint, simplicity against complexity. The last of these may be the trickiest, since it's easy for a writer who is working to shape and streamline a story to streamline the story's implications, too, and thereby to exclude larger issues of philosophical or moral concern. So, even while simplifying the story's action, a good writer must also complicate the characters' motives—aims often difficult to balance and sustain.

Few writers in this century have been more aware than was Flannery O'Connor of the need to meet these opposing demands, and few have worked so ruthlessly to bring forward every dimension of their characters. In “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O'Connor remarks with typical trenchancy that “the kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is … the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” Fiction written with the kind of vision O'Connor calls for will invite readers not only to be caught up in action or intrigued by character but also to ponder several of the more interesting facets of human experience—psychological, philosophical, political, practical. The most consistently engaging of these dimensions, I believe, is the one that allows us to view characters in a large context and to make judgments about their actions: the realm of morality.

By referring to the “morality” of short fiction, I don't mean to conjure those stories that present readers with a clear and unambiguous moral or that conform to a narrow, rigid checklist: downtrodden characters shown to be gallant, anger or resentment shown to be cleansing, and so forth. Such an approach, all too common, grinds art into mush. It's hardly surprising that some readers are sick of books that use fiction as an illustration for preconceived opinions and abjure the whole notion of a moral subtext, feeling that any moral awareness on the part of the author turns fiction into a dreary cautionary tale.

But art that truly balances aesthetics and morality can never be reduced to simplistic lessons, and whether we care for the moral dimension of literature or not, it cannot be shut away. Even in fiction as avowedly transgressive as Flaubert's (in which art is held as the antidote to tedious, soul-squashing propriety), or as gleefully subversive as Thom Jones's (in which drugged, drunken characters hurtle through a universe where the lines separating humans from other animals become perilously faint), implied questions wind around the action: What is the significance of all of this? Why is the author bothering to write it, and why should I bother to read it? Work that responds honorably to these questions doesn't produce fiction that is pat or trite but rather blows apart such preconceived categories.

The best stories look not so much for answers as for exploration of human dilemmas. In fact, such stories require readers to put off their hunger for answers, insisting that we first look hard at the fictional situation and come to see its full depths. Chekhov, that most clearsighted and patient of artists, produced work that was profoundly moral by this definition. …

Robert Stone is known as a big writer, drawn to subjects of enduring consequence: humanity's flawed nature, the passionate attractiveness of self-destruction, the tininess of human endeavor in the face of an indifferent universe. His five novels have given him room to explore his material in great and sometimes painful depth, and his work has always carried tremendous gravity—even if some of his characters have been so delusional or drugged out they seemed on the verge of shattering across the page.

So, Bear and His Daughter: Stories presents more than usual interest to readers curious to study how Stone approaches a tighter, shorter format, and whether the violent urgency that has characterized his novels has to be tamed to fit the more restrictive form. But this new collection is in no way a lesser, scaled-down version of Stone's novels. If anything, it's even more powerful than the earlier books; in the best stories, “Miserere” and “Under the Pitons” and the brilliant “Helping,” Stone distills the strength of his novels and presents material with what feels like controlled fury. Although the stories have been written across thirty years, they are surprisingly unified in their vision and perspective. The effect of reading them is similar to that of having a bright light explode in one's face.

Many of Stone's familiar subjects are here—addiction, crime, characters living on the edge of society. But however marginalized they have become, these characters are active in their lives, striking out against the situations that have isolated them. In “Under the Pitons” a man abandoned at sea struggles for hours in a hopeless effort to save a woman he might love. In “Miserere” a Catholic convert demands that her priest bless and perform a Catholic burial for aborted fetuses she has brought to him, triumphantly reminding him that God's law is higher than human law—and certainly higher than the priest's own squeamishness. And in “Helping,” an alcoholic who has been sober for fifteen months begins to drink again, demolishing in a single action the wall of desperate, willed decency he had erected, so that by the end he is facing down his priggish neighbor with a shotgun. The actions in these stories are violent, sometimes almost berserk, but they are persuasive; Stone has a gift for finding the moments that define characters in their despair and rage.

Rigorous honesty of emotion is crucial in this work; without it the drama would dissolve into melodrama, with characters adopting grand postures for the pleasure of adopting grand postures. Indeed, many characters here (usually in the grip of drugs or alcohol) do start declaiming like bad actors, caught in the self-indulgence created by addiction. Elliot, the protagonist of “Helping,” reflects on this after he tries, and fails, to shoot a pheasant.

Lowering the gun, he remembered the deer shells he had loaded. A hit with the concentrated shot would have pulverized the bird, and he was glad he had missed. He wished no harm to any creature. Then he thought of himself wishing no harm to any creature and began to feel fond and sorry for himself. As soon as he grew aware of the emotion he was indulging, he suppressed it. Pissing and moaning, mourning and weeping, that was the nature of the drug.

The passage, written with extraordinary authority, works fiercely through several emotions—Elliot's rational awareness of his action, his drunk and approving judgment of himself, and his swift second judgment filled with weary self-loathing. The very speed Stone uses to chart Elliot's sliding reactions suggests a kind of ruthless impatience, a desire to strip away all these transitory, insignificant human responses in order to hit some kind of bedrock understanding about the man's nature—about all of our sorry natures.

As reflected by Stone's fiction, we are unfortunate creations: vain, careless, the catalysts of one another's downfalls. But the element that makes Stone's work so gripping is that his characters' choices never feel predetermined. Indeed, a spectrum of options yawns before them, including more ruinous ones than many readers could stand to contemplate—the poet who seeks consolation in his daughter's bed in “Bear and His Daughter,” the small-time hoods who set a boat adrift while its crew members are taking a swim in “Under the Pitons.” But the possibility always exists in these stories for survival of body and spirit, survival in the face of the odds. Mary Urquhart, the central character of “Miserere,” might well have been shattered by the drowning deaths of her husband and children, whose cries for help she didn't hear through her drunken haze. But with a fierce spirit that resembles Elliot's in “Helping,” she willfully rebuilds her life, finding angry, ugly penance in bringing the unborn fetuses to a priest for blessing and burial. When Frank Hooke, the priest who has been uneasily cooperating with her, finally refuses, she turns on him:

“How contemptible and dishonest of you to pretend an attack of conscience,” she told Hooke quietly. “It's respectability you're after. And to talk about what God wants?” She seemed to be politely repressing a fit of genuine mirth. “When you're afraid to go out and look at his living image? Those things in the car, Frank, that poor little you are afraid to see. That's man, guy, those little forked purple beauties. That's God's image, don't you know that? That's what you're scared of.”

He took his glasses off and blinked helplessly.

“Your grief …” he began. …

Mary Urquhart pushed herself upright. “Ah,” she said with a flutter of gracious laughter, “the well-worn subject of my grief.”

Refusing to accept his clumsy attempt at consolation, she continues to chide and castigate him until he, less strong than she, finally begins to weep. “‘Oh Frank, you lamb,’ she says then, resting her hand on his shoulder, ‘What did your poor mama tell you? Did she say that a world with God was easier than one without him?’”

This last question goes to the heart of Robert Stone's art. The possibility for goodness and psychological resolution exists in his world, but such resolution is never easy, as nothing about our lives is easy, and requires movement at several levels. This view of human potential holds little comfort, but it's exhilarating, and the experience of reading these stories feels as revivifying as an immersion in icy water. Stone, who rejects simple answers and comfortable belief, has written a book whose morality shows itself through the freedom he gives his characters to face a blank universe and find in it what they will.