Dog Soldiers: A National Book Award Winner

Boring

I first picked up this novel about fifteen years ago, after I'd seen the film adaptation of it-the strangely titled "Who'll Stop the Rain" with Nick Nolte and Michael Moriarty. I had never read any of Stone's work before, and I was absolutely blown away by this, his second novel and winner of the National Book Award. The story of drug smugglers in the waning days of Vietnam, the novel owes much to American Naturalism (Stone has been compared to Conrad, but I think Jack London and Stephen Crane are closer), but filtered through the post-war sensibility of Ken Kesey or even Hunter S. Thomson. Fast-paced and utterly plausible, the narrative ranges from the shadowy cafes of war-time Hanoi to the lawless valleys of the American southwest. Throughout, Stone describes the varying landscapes of moral corruption with equal vividness and intelligence. For my money, "Dog Soldiers" is the best novel of the 70s, and yet it still seems completely contemporary today. I re-read it every few years and always discover something new.

I read this book for a college course on the cold war. I couldn't believe my professor. He actually apologized for putting it on the curriculum! He said that it was perhaps too gross, or graphic.... or something. How insulting!...How are we s'poseta learn about the cold war if the teachers teach with sterilized kid gloves. This book is, to Vietnam, a more accessible version of what Gravity's Rainbow is to WWII. It's harsh but not without redemption. Dog soldiers is goods good good...

This is as true a take on the corrupting effect of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam as you will find. It is a world in which most people are torn from their moral and ethical moorings. Like Converse, one-third of an unholy triangle that includes his wife, Marge, and his best friend, Ray Hicks. The book is a chronicle of how Ray sticks to his moral code, as the rest of the world goes haywire around him. It's left to the reader to decide who is crazier--Ray or the world he lives in. This book is an essential part of the American experience. If you were of draft age during Vietnam, reading this will confirm for you the craziness of the times. If you weren't, this book provides a window into an era that was even stranger than the current one.

If you came of age in the late 60's and early 70s (as I did) and found yourself at the center of the counterculture (in my case, Madison, Wisconsin), you'll recognize all of the characters who people this extraordinary story. In no book I've read are they rendered with such precision and invested with such uncanny life. Charmian, the heroine dealer, is the most sensuous femme fatale in American Literature. There's Danskin, the hippie narc, turned by the feds to surveil the counterculture -- a far more convincing psychopath than Hannibel Lecter. There's Smitty, the jailbird 'muscle', for Antheil, the 'bent' DEA agent. There's Converse's own mother, nursing home-bound and lost in paranoid dementia -- and my personal favorite, Eddie Peace, the wheeler-dealer who supplies drugs to the Hollywood film community. And these are only the supporting cast. Converse, Hicks and Marge are the richest, deepest, most dimensional protagonists in recent fiction. The story is at once twisting, turning action-adventure (it was made into the wonderful movie, 'Who'll Stop The Rain,' with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty, all perfectly cast) as well as a dark parable of the Manson-flavored decline of the Woodstock Generation. Briefly, John Converse, a playwright, has decided to escape a degrading job (he writes for his father-in-law's skin magazines ('Woman Impaled by Falling Skydiver!')) and failing marriage and becomes a freelance journalist in Vietnam. As his tour draws to a close, he has a brainstorm: Buy two kilos of pure, Golden Triangle heroine, smuggle it back into the US and reap the enormous profits. For the smuggling, he calls on old friend Ray Hicks, a merchant marine who's a student of Nietsche and Zen, and 'cultivates the art of self-defense.' Hicks agrees to carry John's skag when the USS Coral Sea departs Vietnam for San Francisco. Trouble is, Charmian's tipped off Antheil, the crooked DEA agent, and he (in the persons of Danskin and Smitty) are waiting for Hicks when he delivers the heroin to Converse's wife, Marge. A page-turning chase ensues that takes Marge and Hicks into the dark netherworld of the Los Angeles drug scene (circa 1970) and ends at a New Mexico commune very like Ken Kesey's own psychedelic ranch. (Stone was one of the drivers on Kesey's bus, 'Further.' Imagine, Ken Kesey, Robert Stone and various Beat poets (Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, et al.) on the same bus! An astonishing time and place!) I can't overstate the excellence of this masterpiece. More than any since Conrad's and Hemingway's (writers Stone's often compared to) this novel confirms that classic quality and rivetting story are not mutually exclusive categories. His two subsequent novels, 'A Flag For Sunrise' and 'Children of Light' are both excellent -- as was his first novel, 'Hall of Mirrors.' ('Flag' may be as good as 'Dog Soldiers.') If you found his last two novels, 'Outerbridge Reach' and 'Damascus Gate,' a bit slow-going