World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Fun with Problems

Name: Fun with Problems
Author: Robert Stone
ISBN: 9780547394534

by Robert Stone

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Overview

In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is “one of our greatest living writers” (Los Angeles Times). The stories in this new collection share the signature blend of longing, violence, and black humor with which Stone illuminates the dark corners of the human soul. Entire lives are laid bare with remarkable precision, in captivating prose: a screenwriter carries on a decades-long affair with a beautiful actress, whose descent into addiction he can neither turn from nor share; a bored husband picks up a mysterious woman only to find that his ego has led him woefully astray; a world-beating Silicon Valley executive receives an unwelcome guest at his mansion in the hills; a scuba dive takes uneasy newlyweds to a point of no return. Fun with Problems showcases Stone’s great gift: to pinpoint and make real the impulses—by turns violently coercive and quietly seductive—that cause us to conceal, reveal, and betray our truest selves.

Synopsis

Robert Stone, author of the National Book Award winner Dog Soldiers, returns with this collection of stories and novellas involving violence, longing, black humor, and various vices.

The New York Times - Antonya Nelson

Stone combines highly realistic and contemporary-seeming people and scenarios with an old-fashioned loyalty to the traditional sources of conflict. In these pages, it's quite plausible that you will encounter not only Man versus Self but also Man versus Nature. How refreshing…It's true you might resist wanting to know the people in Fun With Problems or, maybe more tellingly, seeing yourself in them. You might turn away from the uncomfortable truths you don't wish to receive, from the mature, dissolute, ultimately heartbreaking rites of passage that fill these pages. But a genuine coming-of-age story demands that its subject resist the experience. No book is for everyone, but some books can be fully taken in only when the reader is ready. Fun With Problems is a book for grown-ups, for people prepared to absorb the news of the world that it announces, for people both grateful and a little uneasy in finding a writer brave enough to be the bearer.

About the Author, Robert Stone

ROBERT STONE is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.

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Editorials

Antonya Nelson

Publishers Weekly

Lonely and frustrated lives are explored in this new collection from the National Book Award–winning author of Dog Soldiers. Stone's evocative prose treads through the murky waters of dead dreams and waning hopes, bringing out the pathetic and nasty side of people warped by addiction, sex, violence and time. Characters are almost blind to redemption, like the alcoholic professor-artist of “The Archer” who lashes out at a world that wants to celebrate him, or the Silicon Valley executive in “From the Lowlands” who has built a mansion, only to discover that no matter how much of the world you conquer, there's always something hunting you. “High Wire,” a story about a Hollywood screenwriter's on again/off again affair and friendship with a bipolar actress, condenses the years between “the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton” into a wrenching treatise on love, addiction, success and failure. Stone doesn't just let his wounded characters whimper in the corner. He turns them loose on a world hard enough to knock them down but indifferent enough to not care about them once they're gone. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Stone (The Dog Soldiers) here returns to the short story form, offering characters that are unsentimental yet not unreasonable and take enough rope both to entangle and to hang themselves as they move through years of "man-woman relationships." Throughout, the scenery lies on the troublesome edges of Hollywood, academia, and bars, and Stone's pared, precise lines take on the lyrical authority of morality tales: "Leroy traveled east into the high country pursued by little sense of sin. He had made a lot of money being no worse than anyone else in the San Francisco Peninsula data business and in his way contributing a lot." Yet the players are not without moments of shimmering revelry or self-awareness of the heights, as in "From the Lowlands," in which a cocky businessman finally gets his reckoning as he clings to life on an inflatable ball in a poolside encounter with a panther. There's a dark humor at play here, the laughter of the rehab houses implied in the title. Few other writers could use a phrase like civic poetry so conversationally and have it be so cogent. VERDICT Readers who enjoy the caustic prose of Mary Gaitskill or Lee K. Abbott will gladly take this book to bed with them. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]—Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL\

Kirkus Reviews

Alienated, angry outsiders stalk the dangerous edges of their unraveling lives in the great American novelist's collection of grim short fiction. The mordant pleasures begin with a perfectly chosen epigraph, much too good to give away. Then we plunge headlong into Stone country (Bay of Souls, 2003, etc.) with the title story's unsparing portrayal of a weary criminal lawyer's addled relations with his nothing job in a nowhere place, and with a female prison psychologist whose demons are more than a match for his own. Hemingway is skillfully channeled in the perfectly pitched "Honeymoon," taut as a trip-wire as it shows a newly married man sinking under the weight of his obsession with his ex-wife, and in "Charm City," the heartless tale of a weak married man courting romantic adventure, the predatory woman who expertly encircles him and the momentum of self-destruction that consumes every wasted life herein displayed. Stone stumbles slightly in his portrait of an incipiently burnt-out scriptwriter and the emotionally unstable actress who sashays ever more destructively in and out of his life over the years ("High Wire," which echoes a little too closely his 1986 Hollywood novel Children of Light), and in "The Archer," which chronicles the outrageous sociopathology of a vagrant college art prof whose middle age, we guess, might be the one J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man would grow into. Mastery re-emerges in "From the Lowlands," the crisp, Ambrose Bierce-like fable of an electronics mogul whose lavish western mountain retreat can't insulate him from the shadowed clutch of nemeses approaching. Equally fine is "The Wine-Dark Sea," in which a renegade journalist crashes an island policy conferencehosted by an increasingly unhinged U.S. Secretary of Defense-Caliban meets Conrad's "Mistah Kurtz," as incisive literary allusions and pistol-whip prose conspire to create a hilariously funereal Gotterdammerung. Vintage Stone. Enough said.

From the Publisher

"David Colacci gets to the heart of each piece with the perfect ironic tone while still expressing the characters' wonder at nature's beauty and life's follies." —-AudioFile Earphones Award Winner