Bear and His Daughter

From the Publisher

"Masterful and wrenching." Boston Globe

"A volume of short stories that belongs alongside those of Raymond Carver . . . Brilliant, moving, often gloriously funny and triumphant." The San Francisco Chronicle

"As interesting a group of stories as can be found in contempory literature." The Miami Herald

Jennifer Howard

Booze hounds and dope heads, trippers and pill poppers: Just about everybody in these seven hypnotic stories is getting over or giving in to a serious case of substance abuse. It's like the '60s all over again, except that every trip is a bad trip, and the flower children aren't trying to raise consciousness, they're trying to drown it out. "There are times when I don't think I will ever be dead enough -- or dead long enough -- to get the taste of this life off my teeth," says Elliott in "Helping," trying to explain to his wife why he's fallen off the wagon after 18 sober months. A social worker, Elliott has been driven back to drink by a client whose dream about wartime Vietnam -- which the client never experienced -- uncannily recalls Elliott's own nightmarish service there, under "a sky that was black, filled with smoke-swollen clouds, lit with fires, damped with blood and rain."

Best known as a novelist (Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach), Stone brings a deceptive lyricism and a knack for emotional complexity to these shorter pieces. He doesn't condemn his addicts; neither does he sentimentalize them. Taking a shot at a bird, Elliott misses: "he was glad he missed. He wished no harm to any creature. Then he thought of himself wishing no harm to any creature and began to feel fond and sorry for himself ... Pissing and moaning, moaning and weeping, that was the nature of the drug." Elliott's relapse has a certain perceptive hopefulness to it; there's life beyond the bottom of the bottle. But things don't always turn out so well for Stone's people. In the title novella, drugs show their nastiest side when a poet and his daughter, who share a dangerous desire for poetry, alcohol and each other, have a reunion that gets murderously out of hand.

One of the best, most chilling stories in the book, "Under the Pitons," takes place on a boat bound for Martinique with a hold full of marijuana and cocaine. The pilot, Blessington, and his partner are amateurs at drug-running, and Blessington's trying to get both of them and their haul to safety. Doped up to stay awake, "his peripheral vision was flashing him little mongoose darts, shooting stars composed of random light. Off the north shore of St. Vincent, the winds were murder." And he's using alcohol to kill the fear and his memory of the deal, conducted with three sinister islanders: "It seemed to him no matter how much he drank he would never be drunk again. The three Vincentians had sobered him for life." The drug lords and narcotics agents he fears never materialize. The real enemy is already on board.

Sometimes Stone edges in and out of the shadow of addiction; sometimes he plunges a story straight into the heart of it. But it's not the drugs per se that interest him (in one story, "Mercy," there's no substance abuse at all -- but plenty of abuse of another kind). Liver-wrecking is incidental to these stories; it's the wreck of the soul that intrigues Stone, and he describes it time and again with complex grace and rationed brutality. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Vividly imagined scenes and some startling images convey brooding questions of existence in Stone's first short-story collection, which offers pieces written over a span of three decades. In each of these seven tales (all but the title story previously published), the main characters are absorbed in individual torments, frequently alcohol-fueled, yet all yearn to reach outside themselves to know their place in the universe. In "Miserere," a middle-aged librarian runs from her grief over the deaths of her husband and four children by embracing a cruel, misery-obsessed version of Catholicism. Taking illegally dumped aborted fetuses to Catholic priests to be blessed, she relives her loss again and again. In "Absence of Mercy," a man who grew up abused in a grim Catholic home grapples with the legacy of that injustice. "Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta" finds a hard-drinking, pot-smoking poet living in Mexico. He rides to the top of a volcano with two burnt-out old hippies only to escape and run down the mountain, desperate to recover a sense of perception. In the superb "Helping," a counselor in a Massachusetts state hospital slips back into an alcoholic wilderness when a client reminds him he hasn't really healed from his experiences in Vietnam. "Under the Pitons" presents characters who are literally lost at sea thanks to drugs. The protagonist of "Aquarius Obscured," a speed-crazed mother with a toddler in tow, has a hilariously horrible encounter with a fascist dolphin in an aquarium. Ending the collection is the long title story, which describes a hallucinatory tragedy that results when an alcoholic poet collides with his equally gifted but troubled daughter. Expressed in clean and lucid prose, these short fictions searingly capture the way private pain may become a prison from which a person can spend a lifetime trying to escape.

Library Journal

From the author of Outerbridge Reach: stories written over 30 years.

Kirkus Reviews

A vibrant first collection from the award-winning author of, most recently, Outerbridge Reach (1992) and other thoughtful and powerful novels.

The landscapes of drug addiction and war and its aftermath are depicted with rueful wit and furious intensity in these seven strongly imagined tales, written between 1969 and the present. Even in "Miserere," whose narrative premise (an embittered widow insists that aborted fetuses receive the church's blessing) strains credulity, Stone hooks us with sharp, convincing characterizations. His stories, like his novels, pulse with barely restrained tension: You feel his characters are about to explode. "Aquarius Obscured," an abrasively funny early piece, subjects its strung-out heroine to the "fascist" fulminations of a talking dolphin. Two other stories reveal the violent transformative consequences of drug-running operations, combining Hemingway-like vigor with Kafkaesque despair. The title novella, which traces the downward progression of an alcoholic poet reunited with the grown daughter who blames her own drinking and emotional problems on their longtime troubled relationship, moves with remarkable and implacable swiftness to a devastating climax; it's a compact Greek tragedy set in the Nevada mountains. "Helping" and "Absence of Mercy" trace with harrowing precision the sufferings of men shaped and trapped by the centrality of violence in their earlier lives, as it comes back to haunt them. Stone writes two kinds of scenes better than any other American novelist: summary descriptions of the whole shape and thrust of his characters' lives, and disturbingly visceral accounts of confrontations between his protagonists and their various demons. There are many such scenes here.

For dramatic immediacy and emotional power, Stone has few contemporary peers, and no superiors: altogether, an impressive debut collection that will further whet appetites eager for his next novel, expected later this year.