In 1841 Carlyle opened his series of lectures On Heroes and Hero Worship by speaking of the "common languid times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling-down into ever worse distress toward final ruin". Robert Stone's novels have no heroes, but they are about similar times; he has earned himself a reputation, in America particularly, as a beat-generation Carlyle, a cultural conscience working through fiction. In his earlier novels A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers he pressed insistently on the bruises of America's mercenary and naïve politics and the corrupting inheritance of Vietnam, and his work was praised by critics and the distributors of literary prizes more for its rigorous moral precision, the way in which it laid out shame and guilt without mitigation, than for its craft or style. Now, in A Flag for Sunrise, he has turned...