[In the following review, Miller praises Bear and His Daughter, asserting that Stone is a careful, polished writer who deserves to be read.]

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The insight would come as no surprise to the characters in Bear and His Daughter. Their mistrust and hostility towards life is deep-rooted and pathological, but almost invariably justified by events. The seven laconic tales of betrayal, psychosis and loss collected here evoke a chilly, fragmented, unhopeful culture on the brink of collapse. Fortunately for us, they are also witty, compassionate, impeccably constructed and, for the most part, an astringent pleasure to read.

Robert Stone began writing in the late 1960s, and many of his characters are manifestly casualties of that period. Their problems are those of middle age—failure of purpose, entrenchment in habit, bereavement, physical decline—coupled with a teeth-grinding hangover from the glory days of the counter-culture. To evade the face in the mirror, they avail themselves of methedrine and gun-play, as well as more time-honoured and respectable strategies like sarcasm and alcohol. Conversely, “Miserere,” one of the most brilliant stories here, proposes conservatism as the result of an inner scarring. A widowed librarian embraces abstinence and pro-life activism as a means of dramatizing her rage and grief. In general, however, the stories are ambiguous politically. The world is everywhere seen to be a terminally messed-up place, but Stone is equivocal as to whether the blame is due to human weakness and devilment, or to the butterfly of hippie radicalism's having been broken on the wheel of the State. The characters reflect the same ambiguity; it is considerably easier to imagine how they look than how they vote. Most of them inhabit a kind of afterlife, in any case, so in a way the question is unconstructive.

One character, the “Bear” of the title, is a stalled poet whose work is likened, by the intriguingly named John Hears The Sun Come Up, to that of Robert Frost (“his favourite white poet”). Stone is by no means a pastoral writer—his landscapes furnish the stories with menace, ennui and sadness no less than lyrical nourishment—but, in the same story, the obligatory world-weary sheriff inveighs against the defilement of rural America: “I got little Mormon farm boys giving each other hand signs like they're Crips and Bloods.” This sense of modern changefulness as a cancer on America's body beautiful has been wheeled out by macho conservatives since before John Ford and Frank Capra started making movies, and its presence tends to locate Stone in their camp. But elsewhere any hint of this-land-is your-land romanticism is unbalanced, not only by touches of Flannery O'Connoresque Gothic, but also by the quality of Stone's writing. In “Miserere,” he describes a blasted urban terrain with observant tenderness, even if his purpose is to express his character's exultation in the sorrows of the world. In another story, Mexico is used, as in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, as a playground for the dark secret self—that of America no less than those of the four deranged stoners depicted.

Generally it is the demands of individual characters which dictate Stone's treatment of external details. The stories may hint at a political or physical landscape, but for the most part the author stays obsessively close to his players, and his plotting is focused to the point of claustrophobia. In “Aquarius Obscured,” a cornered woman takes her daughter, and some drugs, to the aquarium. The bulk of the story is a crazed dialogue between her and a dolphin. The animal evolves from New Age guru to apocalyptic prophet to fascist demagogue in a few pages. Stone captures the bizarre plausibility of the woman's skewed perceptions. Generally the dialogue is expertly pitched between sardonic humour and fearful disenchantment.

Most of these stories have previously been published in magazines. The knowledge that Esquire once saw fit to grace its pages with “Under the Pitons,” a pacey, melancholic tale of a drug deal coming apart, may have some readers stampeding to the nearest bookshop; but it will warn others that, while the story has a consummate technical polish, it is in the end a genre piece, suitable to be read by young men on commuter trains. Stone is too good a writer to be recruited to escapist adventurism, and even “Under the Pitons” gestures towards complexity; but his gruff scepticism and testosterone-soaked prose can at times brand him as less than he is. There is a danger that this book will be read lazily; that Stone's care and respect when drawing female characters, his use of nuance and ambiguity, will prove less interesting to readers than the somewhat unsubtle bouillabaisse of Faulkner and Hemingway, seasoned with a splash of post-Vietnam trauma, which he at first seems to offer.

It is perhaps in order to assert that there is more to Stone than meets the eye that the PR puff which accompanies this book invokes the magical adjective “Carveresque”. The term is promiscuously used nowadays, and is certainly misleading in Stone's case. Both writers may read tersely, and both take drinking and desperation as leitmotifs; but Stone's work aims for a broader range of rhetorical effects, and achieves less in the way of metaphysical transcendence, than the grim sage of Clatskanie. Nevertheless, his absorbing, meticulously crafted stories, with their grizzled humanity and uncomfortable humour, deserve to be read.