Wisdom, Hope Fill Stories In ‘Bear, His Daughter’
“Bear And His Daughter” by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin, 222 pp. $24)
No one is ever going to accuse Robert Stone of sounding like somebody else. Despite the reasonable comparisons to Graham Greene, as well as his philosophical debt to most of modern literature and religion, the man’s voice is inimitable. Try to describe Stone’s work in externals and you get a resume from hell: war-torn Vietnam and Central America, the ocean alone at night, New Orleans on a bad acid trip. But the voice that delivers these exotic places is as familiar as a radio saint - courageously terse, frighteningly exact, poised for survival between irony and despair. In the three decades since his first novel, a lot of good writers have tried to emulate him. But nobody gets all the way into Stone territory. It’s as if the man redecorated the abyss and called it his own.
“Bear and His Daughter” is his first collection of stories, containing seven long pieces from the past 30 years. For readers who identify Stone with his panoramic novelist’s vision, these stories show off their creator’s diamond-cutting precision.
The title story, the longest in the collection, is published here for the first time. A middle-aged poet, doomed to mediocrity and with the mind to realize it, is floundering his way through the Western states for a reading series; his real destination (and probably destiny) is to visit his daughter, Rowan - a 31-year-old park ranger who shares his affinity for drugs and alcohol and the heartache of a misspent life. Beleaguered and drunk, Bear is trying to recall from memory his poem, lost years before, about a salmon migration; as with so many epiphanies fated for oblivion, it promises more now than it probably did then.
The stories in “Bear and His Daughter” are masterful and wrenching; the wisdom they contain - and it is considerable - takes its refuge somewhere between the idea of God and the prospect of human kindness. “A little interior clarity and light,” as Bear thinks. “Hope.” All anybody ever needed, and sometimes way too much to ask.