SOURCE: Adams, Robert M. “Fall of Valor.” New York Review of Books 39, no. 6 (26 March 1992): 29-30.

In the following review, Adams offers a positive assessment of Outerbridge Reach, calling the work a “strong, unhappy novel.”

The new book by Robert Stone is a tough Irish-American novel set mainly in and around New York harbor. Its themes are contemporary and touched with cruelty; its prose is as hard as that of John O'Hara, which is high praise. Though basically it is an action story, and Stone's considerable reputation is that of a hard-boiled suspense novelist, the reflective reader will find in the pages of Outerbridge Reach a good deal on which to meditate. Like John Converse, the very unheroic hero of Stone's earlier novel Dog Soldiers, the central figure of Outerbridge Reach is a weak man in a tough situation; that can be either an odd predilection of Stone's imagination...