[Almost] any human movement in Stone's novels becomes, whether this is intended or not, a metaphor for intrusion or intervention, and of the suffering that follows from it. Drugs or alcohol are in that sense also intrusive, a self-inflicted assault on the mind. (p. 37)

A Flag for Sunrise offers anything that can send a body up or down—acid for the hippies, dexies for Pablo, and, for the older folk, lots and lots of booze and grass.

Everyone is tripping out in any way possible, and the different plots are correspondingly fast-paced and phantasmagorically inventive. People only halfway through a joint or a glass of Flor de Cana are transported into a maelstrom of violence, relationships that are as dangerous as they are fortuitous, and brutalities seemingly in excess of what any human body can absorb.

The forward momentum of the narrative is never deflected by the kinds of systems analyses, side trips, historical re-creations, and visionary constructs offered by Thomas Pynchon, whose virtuosity may be compared to Stone's but whose work is significantly different. By dislocations and suspensions of narrative Pynchon keeps us at a mediated distance from political matters, while Stone tries to force us into them.

However bad our past and our likely future might look in Gravity's Rainbow, for example, we are at least equally aware of the author's fabricating genius, his arbitrary violations of historical narrative, and we are allowed to imagine that the book might just possibly be, to borrow a phrase from Joyce, "the hoax that joke bilked." A Flag for Sunrise has its good jokes, but it's evident that … Stone doesn't for a moment want us to think it's in any way a hoax. He has written an emphatically historical novel, and his sense of American history requires that he show himself master of the kinds of actions that follow when intrusions take place—the tactics of involvement, confrontation, chase, flight, entrapment, capture, escape, wounding, the progress of pain, the kill. Such displays of novelistic talent are all the more dazzling—and discomforting—because Stone has managed to weaken most of the human scruples that might obstruct his characters' intrusions as they are pressed forward in the service of power. (p. 38)

[Stone] populates both this novel and Dog Soldiers with predominantly Catholic characters, apparently drawn to the tradition of violence and debasement that includes such Catholic novelists as Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor. But while Stone, who said in a recent interview that he was brought up a Catholic, sporadically reminds us of the traditions of Catholic nonconformism, his novels are given neither structure nor meaning by them. But to insist that such traditions ought to be functioning in his work only betrays a desire to supply Stone's violence with a theological justification in order to dilute its political point, as well as the political distress which will probably be felt by almost any American reader. (pp. 38-9)

A book so resistant to traditional comforts, even the comfort of traditional eloquence, is predictably full of literary echoes and allusions that are comically collapsed on the spot…. Like Catholicism, literature for Stone no longer informs life and does not even provide, as it did for earlier writers, a resource for wry comments on contemporary decline….

Flag is a disturbing book in many ways, some of them not intended. I'm not referring to Stone's politics as such but to the degree to which they may reveal more about his opportunism as a novelist than about his anxieties as a citizen. The opinions that can be inferred about America or its uses of power or the possibilities of resistance to either—none at all, I would suppose, in his view—are so implicated in his creative energies that they don't as yet offer themselves to argument. They are nonetheless available to suspicion. As a writer he is an inveterate showoff, and it ought to be said, in order to keep an important writer an honest one, that novelistic imperialism such as his—I mean that desire for the glamour of ruin that can be articulated only by first discrediting and then disposing of whatever might challenge it, including a clear head—may be worth worrying about, like any other kind of imperialism. (p. 39)