[In the following excerpt, Phillips argues that Outerbridge Reach is a successfully engaging narrative due to Stone's use of meticulous detail.]

“I know of almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process,” John Cheever wrote in one of his letters; “that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the rest, and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.” The best of the following works of fiction accomplish just that, and when a novel or story fails, it often may be because the writer failed to “make sense of what takes place.” The reader is left with inconclusive evidence. …

Joseph Conrad's credo as fiction writer—“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line”—applies to Robert Stone's work as well. His new novel is especially Conradian in the manner, through the written word, he convinces the reader that he or she is seeing, hearing, and feeling his scenes and characters. In Lord Jim, Conrad spoke of “the meticulous precision of statement,” for that alone can “bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things.” Stone achieves such a precision. On every page of Outerbridge Reach he gives us the details necessary to believe his fiction. “That winter was the warmest in a hundred years,” is the novel's first sentence, and immediately the reader begins to relate. Yes, it was, we say, and go on to encounter a falling stock market, polluted waters, further unnatural weather, in a world where nothing seems to work any more.

The hero is Owen Browne, an Annapolis graduate and Vietnam veteran, a former golden boy of whom the author says, “He and his friends had been the last good children of their time.” After them came the hippies, the flower children, the yuppies, the dinks … And that is part of the reason for Browne's discontent. His moment never seems to have come. The beginning of the novel finds him fortysomething, married to the same woman for twenty years, and the father of an insolent teenage daughter. He is resigned to his private unrest. He feels a personal failure in a homeland which fails to function as a community or cause, a land pervaded by the spirit of No Can Do. The rat-infested marshes of Outerbridge Reach seem to symbolize these failures: “He remembered scraps of the place's history. Thousands of immigrants had died there, in shanties, of cholera, in winter far from home. It had been a place of loneliness, violence, and terrible labor …”

The novel revolves about a triangle and a challenge. The triangle involves Browne, the honorable honest man, his wife, and Ron Strickland, a dishonorable and dishonest filmmaker who exploits others and would push his grandmother down a flight of stairs if he thought it would make a good sequence on film. The challenge occurs when Browne agrees to participate in a solo circumnavigation race for which he is inadequately skilled and prepared, having only once sailed alone from West Palm Beach to North Carolina. That time he had suffered both fatigue and hallucinations. Yet Browne accepts the challenge, seeing it as an opportunity to get a hold on his life, to accomplish something visible and solid.

The novel breaks neatly into two halves, before the race and during the race. The chapters alternate between the Brownes and Strickland. The scene and mood shift from highly civilized Connecticut and Manhattan to the elemental world of the sea. Once underway, Browne has close calls with an enormous shark, a plague of insects, and floating icebergs. His problems become almost mythical, while the sailboat on which he has staked his life turns out to be jerrybuilt: “He was riding a decomposing piece of plastic through an Antarctic storm.”

Stone brings to bear numerous literary allusions to illuminate Browne's plight. Among them are quotations from Shakespeare, Marlowe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hart Crane, and of course Melville. For the jacket and title page, the publishers have chosen a Rockwell Kent nautical illustration, Hail and Farewell, and it is highly appropriate, since so many of my generation first read Moby Dick in the Modern Library Giant edition filled with Kent's woodcuts. Like Melville's great novel, Stone's also employs the sea as his image of reality, which ultimately is ungraspable. Like Moby Dick, Outerbridge Reach is a parable on life and existence, with emphasis on all that eludes and crushes the human spirit, all that is out of reach. Both Ahab and Browne become mad in their pursuits. Just as Pip counsels Ahab, the ghost of Browne's father advises him.

It has been written by Dominic Loehnis in The New York Observer (May 25, 1992), that Stone's novel not only echoes Conrad and Melville, but also “commands greater comparison with a book called The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, an account of an around-the-world yachtsman who disappeared in 1969. It was written by two British journalists, the late Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall …” The acknowledgments page of Stone's novel bears the statement, “An episode in the book was suggested by an incident that actually occurred during a circumnavigation race in the mid-60s. This novel is not a reflection on that incident but a fiction referring to the present day.” Loehnis and Ron Hall would have us believe there are more parallels between the two books than “an episode” or “an incident.” And 1969 is not the “mid-60s.” Whatever its sources and inspirations (and they may not matter), Outerbridge Reach is a compelling novel attempting to make sense of what takes place in a world out of control.