SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Seasick.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (6 April 1997): 2.

In the following review, Eder claims that the character and plot development in Bear and His Daughter is uneven and faults Stone for failing to compel readers to care about the protagonists.

Like the protagonist of his last novel, Outerbridge Reach, the principal characters in Robert Stone's short-story collection [Bear and His Daughter.] are single-hand sailors on a course to disaster.

It is not because the gales and currents of their existence are too powerful. Stone's blighted heroic vision proposes extreme hardship as the measure of a sound life. Rather, it is because the sheets and timbers of their craft are unsound, owing to the sleaze and lack of standards in the world that fitted them out.

This, at least, is how they see it. With a couple of exceptions, one brilliant, they see it bleary-eyed, pouring themselves...