#667 The Archer- Robert Stone

#667 The Archer- Robert Stone

This is like a Hunter S. Thompson story, but without the humor and with a lot of anger. Duffy is an art teacher who has a small mythology around campus. It is rumored that he once threatened to kill his wife and her lover with a crossbow that he pointed out them while wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and a tweed hat. He didn’t kill them, or lose his job, but he lost his wife and his house.

Now he was on the college lecture circuit. Most of the story revolves around one of these college trips to Pahoochee Sate University. He gets drunk, belligerent, arrested and can’t leave town until his case is cleared. I can believe that this guy—an asshole—did all that. But why do I care. There is no humor, or irony, or even a subtle wink to the reader that any of this is in good fun or for a reason—even tragic self-destruction would be fine. He’s just an asshole! The literary world is full of them—just like they are full of stories that want to sound like Hunter S. Thompson. 

I wasn’t as impressed with this collection as I wanted to be. It’s ok, maybe a 6 out of 10 compared to the other collections I’ve read for this project. It’s weird though, I’ve picked up a few collections that claim to be “raw” or “edgy” stuff, with tough-talking, hard-drinking characters, like Stone, Denis Johnson, and Craig Davidson—usually a genre I really enjoy—all three have fallen short of the mark.

Rating: 7-6-5-5 Total= 23

#639 High Wire- Robert Stone

#639 High Wire- Robert Stone

I’m not really sure what this story is supposed to be. I suppose it’s an L.A. love story. Unfortunately like all the stereotypes of that city, I found this story to be sprawling, soulless, cold, shallow, and self-involved. It is just a rambling telling of two people who never quite get their relationship on track.

Lucy and Tom are two minor Hollywood players, he a writer and she an actress. They meet at a movie premier and have a brief tryst that I guess we are to believe is somehow meaningful. The next forty pages or so is just their lives without each other, and the brief times that meet up again, never reaching a point where they become an actual item. I guess this is L.A. for deep and meaningful love. I found it to be a story I wish was thirty pages fewer.

Rating: 6-5-3-3 Total=17

#611 From the Lowlands- Robert Stone

#611 From the Lowlands- Robert Stone

Leroy is a wealthy man. He was a in-on-the-ground-floor type of guy in the tech world. He’s got mansions, cars, beautiful woman and not an entanglement in the world. To put it another way…he had everything, but he has nothing. He has shaped his life to seem perfect, but he is shallow. He judges everyone with a harsh spotlight, petty even. He stole half of his company from his only friend who needed help. Instead he was happy when he died.

Now, when he walks down the street people resent him, snicker at his presence behind his back. He thinks, as many wealthy people do of such resentment, that is comes from pure jealousy:

“The successful man is resented by the hewers of wood and carriers of water. The wealthy man of taste and means draws the impotent hatred of the mob.”

Perhaps it comes from thoughts like this:

“He often contemplated with satisfaction the brilliance concentrated within his intellect and will. Sometimes, he knew, it burned with too bright a flame.”

Living in his crystal palace, perfection surrounding him, waiting for he storm, knowing that when trouble comes, nobody will be there to help him.

Rating: 7-6-5-6 Total= 24

#576 The Wine Dark Sea- Robert Stone

#576 The Wine Dark Sea- Robert Stone 

Steadman’s Island off the New England Coast is a small village community. It is being overwhelmed  by the presence of the Secretary of Defense and a high governmnet conference descending on them all. Eric is freelance journalist, wanderer, alcoholic, trouble-finder. He is on assignment for a former nudie-magazine to cover the reaction by the locals.

He stumbles his way into staying with his ex-girlfriend’s sister and brother in-law, Annie and Taylor. This doesn’t go well. To start with, the island was literally and figuratively covered in a dense fog cover. “It was liberating, the complete obscurity. Past, gone, present solitary, future fading out.”

Taylor, it turns out, is a rabid anti-authoritarian, misanthrope recovering alcoholic with a chip on his shoulder and doesn’t appreciate Eric’s crashing at his house. His anger is exasperated by Eric’s Nihilistic banter and his drunken Tomfoolery. Avoiding a fight, he leaves in the morning to get interviews for his story. As crazy as those two are, the Secretary is even more bat-shit nuts. Eric gets tackled by security, Taylor—a ferry worker—gets thrown overboard by the Secretary himself and all the local and federal law enforcement are taking sides. Everybody gets their story. 

There is a big anger theme running through this one. The buffoonish characters are fun to follow.

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#548 Charm City- Robert Stone

#548 Charm City- Robert Stone

Frank Bower falls for a con. He is attending a music recital alone at the museum, and lets himself be seduced by a mysterious woman. He is married but likes the taste of a little adventure and drives her across the bay to his second house. All the while, the woman remains vague and intriguing. When they get to the house, she feigns remorse and asks to be driven home.

We see later that the meeting was not a random occurrence, but a set up, and she had successfully used his vanity to scope out his house for a robbery.

Notable Passage: “Everybody loves you when you’re somebody else.”

Rating: 7-6-6-6 Total= 25

#520 Honeymoon- Robert Stone

#520 Honeymoon- Robert Stone

Scott is on his honeymoon. His young bride, a former student of his, is awash in the morning glow of a tropical island. Everything seems perfect. She goes off to the pool, and he…calls his ex-wife?!

“The light of day, the first hour after dawn. Pure as creation, he thought. She took his hand. He kept hearing the other woman’s voice, the one whose skin was no longer smooth, though it had been, twenty-five years before. You wanted to go, Be gone.”

He clearly believes he has made a huge mistake. As they go for a reef dive—to take the plunge, so to speak—he makes a big decision.

Rating: 7-8-7-5 Total= 27

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

Hampton was a prison town, Mathews was a public defender. He used to be married but he is a drunk and messed all that up. Now he has settled into an existence of complacency and greyness.

“Matthew’s life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.”

“His ambitions had faded, and life could be various and perversely satisfying in Hampton.”

While conferring with a client at the prison, he meets a social worker and convinces her to meet him for drinks, although she herself a recovering alcoholic, only drinks juice. Mathews is like the devil on her shoulder and is extremely pushy about getting her to drink again. He is successful, she drinks, and they hook up.

“His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual, and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught his detachment. The trick was to carry indifferent to his own feelings without pity for things."

Her life goes back down the drain, and his stays in that middle purgatory. If he can’t be happy, the next best thing is to make others unhappy as well.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29