rev. of Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Robert Stone's highly-praised first novel,
A Hall of Mirrors, told of a down-and-out alcoholic radio announcer named Rheinhardt, of his doomed affair with a touching slattern named Geraldine, and of his involvement with ultra right wing politics. Good as it was, there were major flaws with that first work. For one thing, the story, couched mostly in the technique we are accustomed to call "realism," took a sudden turn for the surreal about two-thirds of the way through -- and after living with Rheinhardt's problems and excesses in a realistic context, the reader's mind was unprepared for the transition it had to make in order to retain the necessary suspension of disbelief. Another problem was that Rheinhardt's past was sufficiently suggested but never dramatized. Still,
A Hall of Mirrors, by dint of its technical virtuosity and extreme felicity of style, was a brilliant performance: it is one of those novels like London's
The Sea Wolf and Fitzgerald's
Tender is the Night, a book whose richness of separate parts is sufficient to transcend its flaws.

Dog Soldiers, Stone's second book, published some eight years after his first, won the 1974 National Book Award (sharing it with Thomas Williams). It is a fastpaced, action-fraught novel: John Converse, American, a one-shot playwright and sometimes journalist, is in Vietnam, seeing and writing about what Conrad's Kurtz discovered at the heart of darkness. Converse arranges to have three kilos of pure heroin smuggled to the states by a cook on a civilian boat, an ex-Marine pal named Ray Hicks, a character reminiscent of Hemingway's Harry Morgan. Hicks takes the dope to Converse's wife, Marge, in San Francisco, and soon they are fleeing with it (Marge is using it), pursued by a ghastly assortment of sometime narks, hoods, and psychos -- who in the meantime take Converse in tow as a prisoner. At the end there is a wild shootout near the Mexican border amid a phantasmogoric forest rigged with speakers and Dayglo decorations. Converse manages to reclaim his wife from the bloody chaos and
split, leaving the heroin behind as a peace offering to the relentless, rapacious pursuers. Though the end is bleak indeed, we are left with a kind of hope:

"In the worst of times," he began to tell her, "there's something."

"Ha," Marge said. "There's smack." She watched him pace in bewilderment. "In the worst of times there's something? What?"

"There's us."

Marge laughed.

"Us? You and me? That's something?"

"Everybody," Converse said. "You know."

"Sure," Marge said, "that's why it's so shitty."

Stone has ironed the kinks from his technique with this novel:
Dog Soldiers embodies a brutal, unrelenting and perfect realism -- sometimes events (such horrors as the Great Elephant Zap) may
seem surreal, but it is the events, not the technique. And if anything, Stone's dialogue, one of the strong points of
A Hall of Mirrors, is even better than in his first book: it is as distinctive as Hemingway's and is characterized by cynical, half-humorous understatement. Stone's characters project, through their dialogue, a sense of possessing a veneer of cool tenuously maintained by sneering at the apalling foolishness of mortals, themselves included:

"It's a funny place," Hicks said [of Vietnam].

"Let smiles cease," Converse said. "Let laughter flee. This is the place where everybody finds out who they are."

Hicks shook his head.

"What a bummer for the gooks."

Stone's narrative barrels relentlessly along, and if E. M. Forster is right that fiction's most signal virtue lies in making the reader want to find out what happens next, this book is a marvel. But the virtue is not without cost. Like Stephen Crane's
Maggie, Dog Soldiers is given us mostly in terms of dramatic scenes. And as with that earlier novel in the same naturalistic tradition, there is little sense of a prosaic and mundane life contemporaneous with the events of the novel: the characters are nearly all contemptible swine, metaphors for human -- and particularly American -- weakness, insensitivity, depravity and brutality. There is, in fact, no scale of conventionality against which to gauge the events and characters of
Dog Soldiers. Thus when one finishes the book, instead of the brooding aura of tragedy that you suspect the author -- certainly the reader -- hoped would linger, there is instead a sour puzzlement and a sense of a dirge having been played for life in general -- but without sufficient fullness, in the sense of representing a spectrum of life, to lend the book true poignancy. I suspect this is what brings Rust Hills in
Esquire, after his initial enthusiasm had cooled ("My first estimate of the book . . . was that it is a masterful literary novel of the action sort, like a Conrad novel or
For Whom the Bell Tolls"), to conclude that
Dog Soldiers "is a splendid, not to say terrific, action-suspense novel, a sort of high-grade, very high-grade, mystery novel, with literary overtones."

Another element that contributes to this reaction is, I think, that none of the protagonists ever has the dramatized past each needs for the reader to really care about him. We believe and appreciate and thankfully accept the electric present Stone so skillfully creates, but when we yearn for a sense of the characters' pasts, we get their histories. But we do not
live their histories with them. Even when Hicks is dying in the desert, at a moment when we should most care for him, and when he does have a kaleidoscopic series of recollections of his child- and manhood, it is hard to care. Strangely enough, one can care more for Danskin, the psychopathic hatchetman for a nark named Antheil, who re-creates for Converse a murder he committed as a boy. Danskin is happier to be remembered as a demented murderer than as "that schmuck whatsisname [who got thrown] out of the movies"; nine years in the slammer have turned him into a kind of monster who is animated by cruelty just as Converse is animated by fear. But because he re-lives the experience -- and the experiences that brought him to his present pass -- for Converse
and the reader, we can see him as something more than another metaphor for human depravity.

What
Dog Soldiers most lacks, I think, are these recreated pasts for the central characters, hopefully something that would give the reader the comfortable sense of the past -- and normality -- he can find in Dreiser (though of course Stone is not a plodder like Dreiser, and doubtless he would choose stratagems other than strict linear narration to create pasts). Something does seem needed, for when a reader does not care about the protagonists in an essentially realistically cast novel, that seemds to point the story toward the realm of sociology or slick entertainment and make it something other than an enterprise attempting to plumb the nether reaches of the human heart.

Undoubtedly some of this is quibbling, for Stone has done many admirable things in
Dog Soldiers. For one thing, the whole Vietnam segment, which occupies the first fifth of the book, acts as a jaundiced prism through which we view the rest of the action. Hills is right when he concludes that

Dog Soldiers seems to me very much a Vietnam novel . . . the Vietnam war was archetypically senseless. And it's the very senselessness of it to begin with . . . the
perverse futility of all the death and violence of that war -- that's what Robert Stone somehow manages to capture in
Dog Soldiers.

True enough: the Vietnam portions spill into and infiltrate and permeate the stateside portions: and they let us understand why Converse, basically a kind of lapsed or apostate humanist, replies, when asked why he has indulged in his mad smuggling scheme: "In the absense of anything else." In a world such as Converse has seen in Vietnam, all in indeed permissable and God's existence or lack of it is irrelevant. Converse is so simultaneously numbed and smitten -- as was Kurtz in the Conrad novel from which Stone takes his epigraph -- with a vision of man's depravity that ultimately only fear of harm to himself ("a soft shell-less quivering thing encased in a hundred and sixty pounds of pink sweating meat") can vivify him and make him other than a dead man in life:

Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am.

As for Hicks, when he dies in the desert his cri de coeur reveals him unaltered from the first:

"You know what's out there? Every goddamn race of shit jerking each other off. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis, two hundred million rat-hearted cocksuckers in enormous cars. Rabbit and fish. They're mean and stupid and greedy, they'll fuck you for laughs, they want you dead."

The portrayal of the world's propensity for depravity is as total in
Dog Soldiers as in anything I've read, with little to alleviate the gloom; true, Converse and Marge can at the end conclude "There's us," but that is a faint voice in a sea of blackness.

In any event, Stone has written a fine and absorbing second novel, all in all better than his first, deeper thematically and technically more proficient, but one whose awesome virtuosity makes you wish you'd gotten something more: we feel as we might if Hemingway had written a Simenon or Faulkner a Perry Mason. Long after we've devoured this ugly-storied but esthetically gorgeous tale and have been impressed time and again by Stone's abundant virtues, we still want to know of Converse/Hicks/Marge exactly what it was we wanted to know of
A Hall of Mirrors' Rheinhardt: why are you like this? Perhaps we need to know -- or rather to
experience -- not so much the
why of the characters as the
how: this seems to me the last significant problem confronting a brilliant and prodigiously talented writer, one of America's best.