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Brooklyn-born Robert Stone, 37, spent time in New Orleans and San Francisco during the early '60s as an "active participant" in the counterculture. Some of these experiences spilled put in A Hall of Mirrors (1967), a surrealistic vision of a New Orleans rife with political paranoia. This second novel confirms the talent betrayed in A Hall of Mirrors and reveals added discipline. The book has its flaws, of course. It occasionally luxuriates in baroque bleakness for its own sake. For example, Converse's addled mother is gratuitously trotted on like a lab specimen. The characters' motives, seen through moments of fragmentary introspection, are not always adequate. Still, most of Dog Soldiers is as precise as the cross hairs on a rifle sight. With fearful accuracy it describes a journey to hell and pronounces an epitaph on a time that has not ended. ∎Paul Gray
GUILTY PLEASURES by DONALD BARTHELME 165 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.95.
By now Barthelme's fictional landscape is familiar: a plot of undifferentiated clutter, hedged about with manicured non sequiturs. Though billed as nonfiction, this collage of pieces reads suspiciously like his past story collections—fragmented, humming with vaguely malevolent absurdities. This book's innocent pleasures stem from seeing how far the author can jump. The Consumer Bulletin Annual, for instance, hardly seems a bouncy platform for whimsy. Yet Barthelme somersaults from it into the tale of a hapless soul whose purchases consistently turn out to be substandard. "Consider the case of the bedside clock. 'Check for loudness of tick,' the Annual said. I checked. It ticked. Tick seemed decorous. Once installed in home, it boomed like a B-58."
Barthelme turns a parodist's ear to several deserving sources of modern noise. A mock scenario for a film in the manner of Antonioni blurs the line between significant ennui and utter vacuity: "Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails." A news story of four Bunnies, fired from the New York Playboy Club for losing their "Bunny image," provokes a case history: "Bitsy S., an attractive white female of 28, was admitted to Bellevue Hospital complaining that she could not find, physically locate, her own body."
In draping his motley over perishable structures, the satirist risks that they will some day collapse, taking his work down with them. A number of pieces in Guilty Pleasures are predicated on Richard Nixon, and their bite has already become gummy. One of the book's funnier stories (An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware) overcomes this loss through shameless slapstick. George Washington postpones his rowboat crossing until hearing whether Congress will continue to finance his personal extravagances. Speaking in an age when the printed s looked like an f, an aide informs the general that demands for his horse's accommodations have been rejected: "Both the Houfe Appropriation Committee and the Horfe Appropriation Committee bounced it back."
DOCTOR FRIGO by ERIC AMBLER 311 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.