More Alive and Less Lonely by Jonathan Lethem

Author:Jonathan Lethem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2017-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Dog Soldiers

Robert Stone’s second novel, after announcing himself (and winning the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award) with the Algren-esque bad-trip picaresque of A Hall of Mirrors, was a ruthless diagnosis of the Vietnamization of the homeland. The book works as a bait-and-switch: set first in Vietnam, Dog Soldiers reverts to Berkeley, Los Angeles, and SoCal Desert milieu that inevitably recalls Charles Manson’s, yet never for an instant do the characters succeed in leaving the war behind. Browsing amid porn theaters, “Hippie” cops à la Serpico, tabloid newspapers (“Housewife Impaled By Skydiving Rapist”), drug culture, and—most presciently for the U.S.A. we know today—prison culture, the book surveys both Joan Didion’s and Tim O’Brien’s nightmares and concludes that The Two Are One.

Yet for all that it is topical to Vietnam and the counterculture, to that moment when the early ’70s became the receptacle for all that had curdled out of the ’60s, Dog Soldiers is also a mercilessly doomy, and timeless, crime novel. Particularly as it concerns Danskin, one of American fiction’s greatest psychopaths, Dog Soldiers comes as near as The National Book Award’s ever gotten to the domain of someone like Jim Thomson or Charles Willeford.

And then there is the sheer fried density of the language, where clots of military and druggie jargon and early-’70s pseudo-philosophy ooze through Stone’s tight, clean, driven voice, which derives, it seems to me, from Hemingway, from the Faulkner of “The Bear,” and from Graham Greene, and which ought to speak to any fan of Don DeLillo or Denis Johnson. Stone’s certainly as much a master as Greene of the intentional Pathetic Fallacy, in which the natural environment or world of inanimate objects is made to throb with the psychological matter of the humans moving through it. Check this out:

In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.

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