DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704170571

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY EUGENE McAVOY 

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

STONE REFLECTS LIVES OF THOSE CONFUSED BY THEIR STRUGGLES

BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER

Stories

ROBERT STONE

Houghton Mifflin. 222 pp. $24.

Robert Stone implies in his novels that within the violence, misery and longing of life, there is meaningful experience. Don't expect, however, to find that meaning in Bear and His Daughter. Unlike his longer works, Stone's first collection of short fiction suggests that incomprehensibility is the essence of man's confrontation with his demons, both a cause and an effect of the human condition.

This theme results from Stone's practice of reflecting, rather than illuminating, the lives of his characters, most of whom are battling drugs, alcohol and self-deception. Stone, who won the 1973 National Book Award for Dog Soldiers, examines his outcasts without explaining them, and generally, this technique works.

In ``Helping,'' the most fully realized of Stone's seven stories, Charles Elliot resumes drinking after 18 months of sobriety. Haunted by the meaninglessness of his experience in Vietnam, he repeatedly dreams of a sky that is ``black, filled with smoke-swollen clouds, lit with fires, damped with blood and rain.''

His dream is both his past and his future and a metaphor for contemporary life. Explaining why he started drinking, Elliot speaks for all of Stone's misfits: ``Most of the time I'm putting one foot in front of the other . . . and I'm out of it from the neck up. But there are times when I don't think I'll ever be dead enough - or dead long enough - to get the taste of this life off my teeth.''

At the end of the story, hung over and hoping for forgiveness from his wife, for a small gesture of absolution, Elliot stands in the snow outside his bedroom window. ``Show a hand,'' he thinks. ``Please just show a hand.'' His wife never raises - never offers - her hand. And Elliot, without salvation, waits.

Stone's concern with longing and guilt is nowhere better rendered than in the novella, ``Bear and His Daughter.'' Without adornment or sentiment, Stone dissects the disintegration of a father's relationship with his daughter as both try to escape from the memory of an incestuous episode in their past. The story moves swiftly toward its surprising climax, a powerful example of Stone's skill with psychological studies.

The remaining stories, however, are not so effective. ``Absence of Mercy'' explores the influence of violence in a man's life. Paralleling parochial school discipline with subway violence in New York and genocide in Nigeria, the story is a transparent attack on religion. Though well-written, it suffers from this transparency of purpose and a vagueness of character that robs it of emotional impact.

``Porque no tiene, porque le falta'' and ``Under the Pitons'' examine lives spent drugging and drug-running. The influence of drugs is a recurring subject in Stone's fiction, and he delivers these stories with detached, but frightening knowledge.

The two remaining stories, ``Miserere,'' in which an embittered widow forces a priest to bless aborted fetuses, and ``Aquarius Obscured,'' in which a drugged-out dancer ``communicates'' with a fascist porpoise, suffer from a lack of credibility in both character and plot. They seem contrived and are ineffective in this collection of much stronger works.

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1992, Stone stated that he sees life as ``this enormous empty space from which God has absented himself . . . this enormous mystery that I can't penetrate, a mystery before which I'm silent and uncomprehending.''

Paradoxically, this mystery is the strength and weakness of his collection. Because the mirror he holds up to his characters' lives reflects only empty and meaningless darkness, the reader is left as uncomprehending as Stone claims to be. In life, the incomprehensible is troublesome. In fiction, it is dissatisfying. In Bear and His Daughter, it is both. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk.

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