A Novelist’s Ambition to Define America

Robert Stone was one of those novelists who try to wrap their arms around America itself. His career spanned almost 50 years, but he never really stopped writing about the ’60s and their fallout—American power and virtue collapsing in an eruption of violence and drugs and moral chaos, under the 10,000-mile, decades-long shadow of Vietnam. In 1971, Stone contrived to get a London alternative weekly to send him to Saigon so that he could research a novel about the war that was consuming American life. “I realized if I wanted to be a ‘definer’ of the American condition, I would have to go to Vietnam,” he later said.

Stone’s America is a dark place, but its failures are commensurate with the scale of its aspirations. His protagonists—they can be roughly divided into seekers and ironists, each representing aspects of their creator—are haunted by a vision of life more abundant, a sense of possibility that’s betrayed by their own weakness and the destabilizing undercurrents of history. His prose, with its potent mix of hard-boiled irony, romantic excess, and violent dissolution, can render the mood of a whole period instantly indelible. “If the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men,” thinks John Converse, the small-time American journalist in Dog Soldiers (1974) who’s preparing to smuggle heroin from Saigon back to the States, “people are just naturally going to want to get high.”