James Hynes

I've only met him once, and he wouldn't remember who I am, but the writer Robert Stone and I go way back. One of the first book reviews I ever wrote, long ago and far away in 1981, for a long-defunct political and literary journal out of Ann Arbor, was a review of Stone's A Flag for Sunrise. I loved the book (and still do: it's one of the great American political novels), but by then he was already a literary hero of mine, on the basis of my reading and rereading of his previous novel, Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award, and which was (along with novels by Conrad, Graham Greene, and John LeCarre) one of the chief models for my first novel, The Wild Colonial Boy.

Along the way I've kind of shadowed him, without ever really making contact: when I was accepted at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1987, I was more thrilled by the fact that he was going to be teaching at Iowa during my first semester there than I was by the fact that I'd gotten into the workshop. As it turned out, he won a fellowship and ended up not teaching at Iowa during my two years there, but he did come to visit, about which more in a moment. Later on, I was thrilled again when I came to be represented by Stone's agency, Donadio and Ashworth, which is now Donadio and Olson, whose principal agent, Neil Olson, is still Stone's and my agent.

I've read every book he's ever published, most of them more than once, and I've reviewed, along with A Flag for Sunrise, his subsequent novels Children of Light (for another long-defunct periodical) and Damascus Gate (for the Washington Post). I don't know if they still use it, but I'm still tickled by the fact that on the original Scribner paperback of Damascus Gate, there I am, at the top of the back cover, quoted by name, calling it "a stunning novel by a great American writer."

I guess this is all by way of saying, full disclosure, I'm a fan, and even a very small planetoid spinning in a distant orbit in the same solar system where Stone is a massive, colorful giant (adventures in metaphor!). That said, I can recommend his new book of short stories, Fun With Problems, wholeheartedly. I read it in two big gulps over the weekend, and was reminded once again why I love the guy so much: nobody writes about about people on the fringes—of political movements, of middle-class society, of show business, of academia, of sobriety—with more insight, compassion, and wit. He understands and loves, without ascribing false nobility to them, various druggies, drunks, political paranoids, criminals, and artists, limning their lives in a clear, unsentimental light. One of the best stories in the book, a doomed, druggy Hollywood romance entitled "High Wire," is classic Stone, compact and evocative and heartbreaking, like a distilled novel.

Something else I've also come to realize about him, especially since Damascus Gate, is how funny he can be. Stone is deservedly recognized as belonging to the great tradition of semi-mad, oracular American writers like Melville and Whitman, railing at his countrymen and women for their sins, but even his grimmest books are infused with a mordant wit. And in recent years he's taken, upon occasion, to being flat-out funny. Prime Green, his incisive memoir of the 60s—and Robert Stone knows his 60s, he was pals with Kesey during the Merry Prankster years—has a hilarious chapter about Stone's tenure writing for an Enquireresque tabloid, for which he wrote such deathless stories as MAD DENTIST YANKS GIRL'S TONGUE and SKYDIVER DEVOURED BY STARVING BIRDS. Most of the stories in Fun With Problems are pretty serious, but several of them are played at least partly for laughs. "The Wine-Dark Sea" is a wild shaggy dog story,  featuring a comically drunken journalist, a working-class conspiracy theorist, and a flat-out crazy (fictional) American cabinet secretary. "From the Lowlands" stars an egomaniacal software billionaire, whose bad behavior is a lot of fun to read. But the funniest story, and my favorite one in the book, is the last one, "The Archer," the story of a drunken artist/academic and his failed attempt to deliver a lecture at a third-tier state university along the Gulf Coast. I was laughing so much my cats started to get alarmed and edge away from me. The story has my favorite two lines from the book, evoking the bleakness of the scruffy little Gulf Coast town with hilarious pungency: "Artificial palms stood at intervals among the others like Judas goats at a slaughterhouse to encourage and betray the others. The tiki-torch fuel, together with road stench and beach barbecue pits, gave it all the aroma of a day-old plane crash."   

Did I mention I met him once? I'm getting to it: during my second year at Iowa, he came and spent a week (he was an old friend of Frank Conroy, the late, great director of the Workshop). Unlike a lot of visiting writers who come trailing the nimbus of their own glory and self regard, Stone was a something of a mensch, a subdued figure wearing jeans, a pullover sweater, and running shoes. He gave a reading, as visiting writers usually do, and afterwards, there was a workshop party at my friend John Marks' apartment. These after-reading parties could often be fraught, flamboyant, and/or drunken affairs, as students preened for the visiting Great Writer, but there was little of that at Stone's party (though there was certainly drinking, it being a Workshop party and all). At one point, he was seated in an easy chair in the corner, with a bunch of us literally at his feet as he told hilarious stories about his grad school days at Stanford, where he was in Wallace Stegner's workshop with Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry (imagine being in that workshop, and not being Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, or Robert Stone). Later, though, he was standing by himself against the wall, sipping some whiskey, when I finally plucked up my nerve and approached him with copies of all his books so far (the first four, of ten) and asked him to sign them all. I apologized right off the bat as he took the stack from me. "You must be really tired of having to do this," I said, and he widened his eyes at me and laughed. "Are you kidding?" he said. "This is one of my favorite things in the world to do."

Okay, so this isn't the most colorful literary anecdote in the world. Nobody got drunk, nobody took a swing at anybody else, nobody was witty or sparkling. But it was a lovely moment, one of my favorite ever with a famous writer, and it was a great lesson in humility, in graciousness, and in taking an honest delight in the pleasure other people derive from your books. Robert Stone is one of those rarest of birds, a mensch who's also a great American writer. But don't take my word for it—go out and read his books.