In spite of Stone's continued insistence that "I love America" even if he is "sometimes bitterly critical," and that he regards himself as "a patriot," some reviewers have found his work totally deficient in terms of American values. One wrote, "Not a hint of a whiff of a shred of a trace of a clue about what is best about America has ever showed up in a Robert Stone novel." One approach to Stone's short fiction would be to consider just how he does represent the best of American experience. Another kind of complaint about his work is summarized in wry self-mockery by Stone himself, who called his writing "heavy, lugubrious, life is dreadful, nothing's funny, just one long plaintive wail unrelieved by brio." Since there are numerous expressions of a comic mode in the stories, a consideration of how comedy works (comedy of manner; satire...