Taking on a Decade
GLEICHER, DAVID
Taking on a Decade Dog Soldiers By Robert Stone Houghton Mifflin. 342 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by David Gleicher It is encouraging to find a novel that at least attempts to explore the effects of the...
...They float in the vast moral limbo that was the '60s, are torn by the standard contradictions and ironies, but do little to bring the essential symbolism to life...
...is in turn killed by the politician, who has arrived with his hostage and gets the heroin...
...It seemed necessary that there be something...
...Who or what does Dieter represent, except a ridiculous caricature that no one ever took seriously anyway...
...The result is a failure to draw meaningful distinctions between different figures and developments, which undermines any claims to credibility on the part of his characters...
...The guru fails...
...But when this results in broad generalizations and facile judgments, we are all the losers - our shared need for self-realization is left hopelessly unresolved...
...Hicks and Marge manage to escape with the goods...
...When Hicks kills the guru, it hardly seems worth the bother...
...But he had been in the country [Vietnam] for eighteen months and for all the discoveries it had become apparent that there would be no book, no play...
...In the end Hicks kills him...
...and Marge and Converse flee...
...Marge spouts righteous nonsense: "If I could pray I would pray that God would cause the bomb to fall on all of us - on us and on our children and wipe the whole lot of us out...
...For trying to meet an unhappy American period head on, Robert Stone deserves our applause...
...Hicks is trying to recapture his self-image as the mystic, rugged, American individualist - a Lone Ranger, known only to himself, freely operating despite all the social and political pressures to the contrary...
...That is especially true of Dieter, a laughable, pseudospiritual guru whose mountain retreat is the last refuge for Marge and his former disciple, Hicks...
...In fairness to Stone, it should be remembered that this novel was written in the midst of the era it seeks to evaluate...
...The structural limit imposed by the author on his characters, however, is too narrow...
...No subplots or background developments provide dimension in Dog Soldiers...
...Money in large amounts had never been particularly important to him...
...The next day an unsuspecting Converse arrives, is taken hostage by the politician, and a chase ensues...
...The story is set in 1970, during the months between the Cambodian invasion and Nixon's Christmas bombings, when Vietnam was being discredited even by those who had forced us into it...
...And just as the characters in Dog Soldiers appear lost in a sea of ongoing events beyond their grasp, so, too, does the author...
...Perhaps it is simply too soon to evaluate the '60s...
...Why that something is a heroin deal never becomes clear...
...My Lai, Kent State, race riots, political assassinations - all of this may well be too much to digest in so short a time...
...Unlike Sartre, or Malraux, he seems to have no ideological view of history with which to approach the war, nor does he evince Conrad's ability to use political upheaval for examining individuals caught in major societal shifts...
...In fact, our involvement with Vietnam is hardly over...
...Nevertheless, the fading spokesman of the faltering counterculture is assigned the task of trying to persuade Marge and Hicks to give up the troublesome heroin and return to his fold...
...Dieter is a stock Timothy Leary figure, already milked to death by the media - the implication always being that drugs stupefied the young, allowing their healthy idealism to fall prey to pernicious madmen...
...As for Converse, "His reasons changed it seemed by the hour...
...The heroin deal is the novel's central force and symbol...
...Ultimately, Stone's analysis is an unsatisfying, simplistic homogenization of recent times...
...Unfortunately, though, Dog Soldiers proves to be ponderous as well as self-conscious, and it offers an ambivalent portrait of the decade it seeks to penetrate...
...Rather, he tries to attack the '60s from what can most charitably be called a journalist's perspective...
...One gets the feeling, indeed, that the people in this book are merely tacked on to the plot-not integral to it...
...In recent decades, American writers have shown a remarkable interest in defining our political context and helping us come to terms with our history as a nation...
...Hicks, a Navy friend and skilled black-marketeer, delivers the stuff, only to find that the Mafia-styled politician who is supposed to pay for it actually intends to steal it...
...It seems to represent the final outcome of America's Vietnam involvement, and of the political and "spiritual" movements that grew up in reaction to the war: a return to Berkeley 10 years after the seminal upheaval there, then a mad rush away from what Stone sees as the unfulfilled promise of the counterculture...
...The author sets himself quite a task in taking on an entire decade, and one admires his daring...
...Reviewed by David Gleicher It is encouraging to find a novel that at least attempts to explore the effects of the Vietnam War era on this country...
...What are the people who finally make such a point of rejecting him really renouncing...
...But they have tended either to personalize social and economic realities to the point of missing the larger political dynamics completely, as the "Beats" did in the '50s, or to avoid direct confrontation by taking refuge behind clever satire, as do Heller, Roth and Pynchon...
...So we could stop needing this and needing that...
...A one-time playwright named Converse, now a journalist in Southeast Asia, concocts a scheme to smuggle heroin back home to Berkeley, where his wife Marge is to hand it over to a waiting buyer...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 6
