For several seasons, tourist shops fobbed off what was known as a "God's Eye." Now it's the "Dream Catcher"--a delicate circular frame about the size of an adult's hand, with thongs crossing it in a web, adorned here and there with beads and dyed feathers. The accompanying literature claims it was used by Native Americans to "catch dreams."

Which tribes? Huge differences exist between the Sioux and Hopi and Algonquin, for instance. Is there tradition to the use of the object, or is it a recent invention, perhaps of our own era of "spirituality," with its trend toward sentimentality and kitsch? Whether it is authentic or kitsch indeed, as its prettified feathers suggest, the Dream Catcher would interest Robert Stone. The visible artifacts of many cultures appear in his novels in their weave of detail. Further, for the last 30 years Stone has been catching the dreams of America.

What he has caught is not the Great American Dream but a series of nightmares. He was the first to flesh out the destructive mistrust (we use the reductive term paranoia) that erupted in our midst when the Murrah Building went up. Stone's first novel, Hall of Mirrors, published in 1967, records that paranoia as it occurs both on the Right and the Left—at an arranged political rally or among social services employees. Stone is never a columnist for PEN, that Masonic Lodge of poets, essayists, and novelists, as many contemporary writers aspire to be, peddling the acceptable party line in every book—though he served for a while as president of PEN.

Like a trustworthy sovereign, Stone is no respecter of persons. He listens to individuals rather than lobbying interests. He is an autodidact, as he says himself, meaning he was not processed by an academy. By the time he put in a stint as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford to get a start on his first novel, he had served on an icebreaker in Antarctica, among other occupations. He may be the only enlistee in Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters who is still married to the same wife more than 30 years later, having raised a family while remaining attuned to the bane and the blessing of America, its dreams. Stone is an original.

Dog Soldiers (1974) catches Vietnam and drugs—inextricably woven in a way no one then imagined—and the impact of the fascination with both on American culture. His next novel, A Flag for Sunrise (1981), registers the escalation of paranoia and violence and drugs in the seventies in Central America. This is on the surface, but Stone is revealing, in addition, as I receive it, unspoken prejudices, often racial, present everywhere—only now being acknowledged in the U.S.--but especially against those whose religious faith is not mere spirituality but actual.

Outerbridge Reach (1992) captures misplaced ambition and the temptations resident in it. These run the gamut from pious denial to outright lies when it seems necessary to preserve one's public image over against the morals that were once society's guide. These are the temptations stockbrokers and savings-and-loan managers have fallen into and, more and more, every politician who gains any degree of clout. Some recent presidents seem to epitomize the condition. The novel records ambition in all its permutations, even employing patches of the self-deluding rhetoric such people use to convince themselves of the propriety of their conduct.

In all Stone's novels, catching as they do an American nightmare at its beginning, not its overblown apex, as in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, you encounter a genuinely religious writer. The actions of his people wouldn't seem so awful if he didn't know exactly what they're rebelling against. He is a discerner of morals, hypocrisies, poses, and the inner unbrotherliness that leads us to do violence against those we should love. He has dramatized as no other American contemporary this verdict: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?"

Some have cast him as a latter-day Conrad, but his work doesn't give off the sulfurous scent of Heart of Darkness where Marlow describes his journey toward Kurtz as "a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares." Stone gives us the nightmare itself, no less, but in fiction that conveys it with humor and brio—each moment lived to the hilt, its evil ample to itself and not staining every other.

I've deliberately skipped Stone's next-to-last novel, Children of Light (1986), a special case. These are not children of light but middle-aged minions of darkness. "Oh, darkness above," one prays at a crucial point, "help your sister darkness below." The lives of the characters unfold under the spotlit scrutiny of Hollywood, however, so the public perceives them as children of light. Stars. It is Stone's darkest book by far, so uncongenial to his former publisher and editor, according to Stone, that the publisher declined to promote it. So it is Stone's least-known work.

In many respects, it's also his best. It is one of the few honest books about Hollywood and the unremitting way it uses people up. Not even Nathanael West has communicated quite this horror; in a final scene, an actress digs in a pile of pig manure crawling with maggots, calling herself "Legion," a deliberate biblical parallel. She is schizophrenic—her hallucinations appear horribly in the book—and the source of the dark prayer. Hollywood with its hubristic cruelty, represented in its generations by a father-son directing team, cashes in on her illness.

Bear and His Daughter

By Robert Stone

Houghton Mifflin

222 pp.; $24

Where there is no vision, a proverb says, the people perish. A better translation for vision (as the NKJV has it) is revelation. Without that revelation "people cast off restraint," in contrast to the parallel verse: "Happy is he who keeps the law." The revelation referred to is supernatural, inspired, and when people cast it off they invent visions of their own. These are always self-indulgent, deluded, the death-dealing inanities of Hollywood, and that is the point of Children of Light. Misplaced or invented vision is indeed the burden of Stone's work.

In all of it, in prose marked by a meticulous and poetic lucidity, Stone smuggles into our era of ennui and restless anomie a remarkable element: hope. Converse, the conflicted journalist of Dog Soldiers, speaking at least partly for Stone, summarizes the process:

He knew the sort of people he was addressing and he knew the sort of moral objections they found most satisfying. Since his journey to Cambodia [where Converse was nearly killed and overcome by fear of death], he had experienced a certain difficulty in responding to moral objections but it seemed to him he knew a great deal about them.

There were moral objections to children being blown out of sleep to death on a filthy street. And to their being burned to death by jellied petroleum … .And moral objections to people spending their lives shooting skag … .

Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline.

It's the dogged determination to reach the final sentence that lifts us from our seats. For this reason and others mentioned earlier, Stone's work delivers a shock—of recognition, surprise, the haunting memorability of dreams. The movement of each of his novels isn't easy to forget, and the enduring trait of imaginative work is the arc its action takes through space, the brilliant burn of its trajectory.

Perhaps it was the reluctance to promote Children of Light that brought Stone back to his original publisher for his first collection of stories, seven in all. Six have appeared over the years he has been publishing; the seventh, the title story of the collection, a novella called "Bear and His Daughter," appears here for the first time. Not one of them is slight.

"Miserere" follows the mind of Mary Urquhart, a New Jersey librarian, a recovering alcoholic and a convert to Catholicism, as she and a friend and some shady priests work out a service and burial for deformed babies a hospital has tossed out with its garbage. Mary, diffident yet wise to the world, has been haunted by death since her husband and children broke through the ice while skating and were lost in one night. First she drank but now finds herself called to this act, encouraged in it by a zealot friend, Camille.

The story is unsparing, its details gruesome, and the chicanery in medicine and the clergy equally exposed, yet Mary's yearning compassion, underscored by her great loss, modulates and somehow oversees the whole of the story. Her tender grief makes the morass of evil bearable, and her story is a microcosm of America at the moment, and more.

A genteel North Carolinian, she is doubtful and ironic about what she's doing and the people she is mixed up with, but when a loathsome monsignor and vulgar acolyte begin the service for the misshapen babies under canvas:

Finally, she was alone with the ancient Thing before whose will she still stood amazed, whose shadow and line and light they all were: the bad priest and the questionable young man and Camille Innaurato, she herself and the unleavened flesh fouling the floor.

The story is an ultimate plea for mercy to every person made in God's image—Miserere nobis.

"Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta" opens with a cry when scorpions threaten children on a beach. The children's parents, Fletch and Marge, are also threatened—by a potent and evil figure exerting influence on a group of Americans in Mexico, a Ken Kesey-type, Fencer. A confrontation takes place between Fencer and Fletch near a volcano—exacerbated by Willie Wings, a Neal Cassady-like figure who pilots Fencer's psychedelically painted car—and Fletch has to find his way home through tortuous and uninhabited country.

When he finally gets there, Fencer is in bed with Marge. A central topic of consideration among the trio of men has been what is a poet, who is a poet? Stone seems to be suggesting that the person who endures humiliation and abuse, including seeing his wife seduced, is as Willie Wings says, "really a poet." The revelation reverses the aesthetic freedom promoted by the academy (a Platonic carryover the apostle Paul warned about), no matter how the artist conducts his or her personal life. The epitome of the artist in the harrowing world of Stone, then, is not Marlowe or Rimbaud or Dylan Thomas, but Jesus Christ. It is his image that resides, by whatever means, at the center of Stone's consideration of the artist's role.

The story "Helping," about a counselor rocked back into his Vietnam syndrome when a counselee recounts a war story that probably isn't true, seems a favorite of editors, in view of its wide anthologization. Elliot is the counselor, and readers are undoubtedly entertained and kept on edge by his drunken talk—once he breaks down and begins drinking—and his encounter with a neighbor in the snow with a 12-gauge shotgun he's sat up with all night. Of deeper interest is the effect of Elliot's actions on his wife, a social worker, and the flicker of hope, a hallmark of Stone, seen in the story's final gesture.

"Under the Pitons" explores a further side to the drug-smuggling of Dog Soldiers. Of the multicultural crew that mostly perishes, an attractive woman from Texas emerges as a rarity in Stone, one who dies an exemplary death. She goes down singing the doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow"--a further reminder that Stone understands exactly what he's up to in religious terms, and he reminds his readers of this through his use of biblical texts and terms.

"Aquarius Observed" was published in 1969, though it could have been written yesterday, considering its material; then again, in our day it might not see the light of print. Among the mix of other signals introduced in the story, the premise is this: what if a species, such as dolphins, whom a few people believe to be superior to humans, actually thought it was? A dolphin in an aquarium communicates with a woman, advising her that "Without cruelty you can't have love. If you're not ready to destroy someone, then you're not ready to love them." This is the dangerous sentimentality of the Age of Aquarius, the late sixties and seventies.

When the young woman, Alison, cries out in horror, "You're a fascist!" the dolphin replies, "Your civilization has afforded us many moments of amusement. Unfortunately, now it must be irrevocably destroyed." It took a bit of stout-hearted open-mindedness on the part of the gentle and discerning Ted Solataroff to print "Aquarius" in The New American Review in 1969. Though Stone might now prune a few infelicities from this early story, it still stands up, and seems all too relevant to present-day species speculators.

The title story, "Bear and His Daughter," is a bombshell. An elderly bearded poet, named Smart but known as "Bear," is on a reading tour of the western states and decides to see his daughter, Rowan, who works as a ranger in a national park. Smart is drinking himself to death, like other Stone protagonists who display the compulsiveness driving the American Dream. Smart calls ahead, perhaps hoping to be turned away, but his daughter's fellow ranger and live-in friend, John Who Hears the Sun Come Up, answers the phone; he and Rowan are waiting. Through him Smart learns that Rowan, hooked on alcohol and drugs herself, has been transferred to park law enforcement, and is angry.

Stone Smuggles into our era of ennui and restless anomie a remarkable hope.

When the story shifts to Rowan's perspective, we find she's angry not just at the transfer but at her father, who always ignored her, she says, unless he thought he could score on drugs from her. But she loves him and seems determined to cause him to love her in return, in any way; she claims—truthfully or not—that they slept together a few years back. In her new role she has a pistol.

Smart himself seems eager for crumbs of attention; when a young cocktail waitress tells him he has nice eyes, "He felt so pleased he could only smile. A man had to keep settling for less. Patronizing compliments. You became a few scattered lines of your own poem." His attraction to Rowan is not healthy. Fathers are often drawn to daughters who embody, in a less hard-edged way, their attributes, and every father has to look at a daughter sometimes with an eye to seeing her the way young men do, as a protective measure. There are daughters, too, such as Stone depicts, who want to swallow the essence, the accomplishments, the texts and poems of a father.

The familiar label for this is the Electra complex, but the situation might more helpfully be viewed as the daughters-of-Lot effect. That potential lies at the door of every household, Christian as well as any other. And it was the believing community of Israel that first received warnings about incest, long before Greek playwrights or psychologists chimed in. "Reveal to me my secret flaws" is a prayer that Robert Stone seems to take seriously, even when his characters don't.

Unpalatable as "Bear and His Daughter" might be to some, it is a cautionary tale for all. Without revealing what the reader should discover, I can say that both father and daughter die violent deaths. The surprising (but not surprised) survivor is the Native American, John Who Hears the Sun Come Up. He has tried to wean Rowan from the drugs and self-delusion that speed her toward destruction. He leaves when Bear arrives, since she won't follow his admonitions, a pastoral figure who has spoken the truth in love. And why not?

If it's true as one reads in the first chapter of Romans, to take one example, that God reveals his attributes in the creation itself, and that he extends grace to those made in his image each day, merely by providing with no distinction life-giving rain to all, then why do churchgoers imagine that somebody attentive to creation can't read those signs? Or should belong to an approved evangelical outreach to read them? And this: Native Americans revere children and have been accused of idolizing them, yet it is John who attempts to place Rowan and Bear in the right relationship to each other and so end their mutual idolatry.

John stands in opposition to the academic intellectuals of Smart's crowd, who encourage every opinion, no matter how silly and obtuse, as long as it doesn't claim to be authoritative or conflict with theirs. Stone has taken a courageous stand in this story, and I look forward even more eagerly to a novel said to be on the way. It is tellingly titled Damascus Gate.

Although the matrix and the language in his work might offend a Victorian sensibility, which has nothing to do with a Christian one, I'm sure Stone will offer in this forthcoming work new perspectives and new application for belief, as he has in his previous novels, and as this collection of stories so clearly and openly does. I hope others are not too busy with the visions of Hollywood to miss one of America's most profound religious writers, Robert Stone, the catcher and recorder of those dreams that arouse the world from its complacent sleep.

Larry Woiwode's novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall has been reissued in paperback in Graywolf Press's Rediscovery series.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 40