In novels like Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, Robert Stone has displayed a facility for creating characters dangling at the end of their rope. His first collection of short fiction in 12 years offers an assortment of these archetypal burnt-out cases, struggling to make the best of the bad situations most have created for themselves.
Typical of Stone's characters, many plagued by drink and drugs, is the cynical public defender of the collection's title story, whose "life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom." And there's the intermittently successful screenwriter whose long-term infatuation with a drug-addicted actress, played out in the story "High Wire," consists largely of observing the downward spiral of her addiction.
In "Charm City," a man "naturally discontented with his work as with other things" meets a mysterious woman at a Baltimore recital. When he takes her to his home on the Eastern Shore for what he imagines will be a quick and anonymous affair, he sets in motion a startling chain of events. And with brutal economy in the barely four pages of "Honeymoon," Stone paints a chilling portrait of a man who, fresh from marriage to his trophy wife, senses his world unraveling.
The story "From the Lowlands," is perhaps the most disturbing of the collection. In it, a cutthroat Silicon Valley entrepreneur capable of making a business associate "disappear, corporately speaking," travels to his spectacular vacation home in the rugged California high country. There, his feelings of self-satisfaction and self-loathing mingle until the story's terrifying climax, when he comprehends he's at the mercy of malign forces destined to destroy him.
But even amidst his despairing view of humanity, Stone is masterful at penetrating the surface darkness of his characters' lives to find the darker humor that lies beneath. In "The Wine-Dark Sea," a failed journalist encounters a prominent politician on a fog-shrouded island just in time to chronicle the official's humiliation and downfall. Musing about his own stay in a rehab facility called "Possibilities," the writer observes that it was "well-named, since anything could happen to you there, from being whacked with a chair leg in a locked corridor by a brother or sister bipolaroid to a lightning-fast heave-ho if your money ran out."
Like life itself, Robert Stone offers no tidy endings. Most of the characters in Fun with Problems are still flailing away at their demons as the stories close. Somehow we know things will end badly for them, each a failure at life, save for their uncanny skill at serving as agents of self-destruction.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: In this ironically titled collection, prize-winning novelist Robert Stone delivers insightful and at times wickedly funny portraits of troubled characters sowing the seeds of their own downfall.