Volume 22, Number 5 · April 3, 1975
Bringing the News
By Roger Sale
Dog Soldiers
by Robert Stone
Houghton Mifflin, 342 pp., $8.95
Dog Soldiers is a truly grim book, relentless in a way that makes other books claiming to look at the dark side of American life seem at least slightly deflecting or palliative in their final effect. Robert Stone's publishers say he offers a 'vision of our predicament,' but if that were true one could turn aside, call it just a vision and Stone a grouse, and that's not the way it works. Dog Soldiers does not expose, or show, or put on a performance for readers. It is an absorbed realistic novel, telling a story, always working to get it told right, much closer to Theodore Weesner's The Car Thief in this respect than to Something Happened or Gravity's Rainbow, which are 'visions' of life that a reader can finally take or leave. As a result, one presumes, these books can be popular in a way that Dog Soldiers, homely and serious as wood, beautiful only in its integrity, will probably never be.
Review, 2459 words
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