Strong collection by Stone. It lacks a power house story like Bear and His Daughter's "Under the Pitons." In fact there are probably at least three or so stories from Bear that I would rank higher than the offerings in Fun with Problems. That said, I do feel that Fun with Problems is more consistent in quality than the earlier collection. There are no real low points (well, unless you want to take into account Stone's universe of stoners, losers and betrayers), with things staying steady in the downward spiral of Stone's characters. If there is a weak link, it's probably the title story, which seems a mean meandering trip to nowhere. But even there, you can always hang on to the sentence, the description, the dialogue, because Stone, at age 73 (and not in the best of health) is that increasingly rare bird in this post literate age: a writer's writer. I have often likened Stone to Conrad, but here he seems closer to Nathaniel West, as the slime of Hollywood seems to dominate. It's a collection filled with writers, actors, artists, and drugs (lots of them), and has Stone returning to the world of his most overlooked novel, Children of Light. I'm glad for the return trip, because Stone knows Hollywood, and the characters that live there. It's largely a dark trip, with some gallows humor thrown in (along with razor sharp dialogue). But for all of it's darkness, Stone, in the collection's last story, "The Archer," through the eyes of a drunken artist named James Duffy, let's a little light in:

In all of Stella's good early stuff, all those wild whirling colored lights, was about the teeming overripe possibilities of the coming age, maybe his, Duffy's, was about the exhaustion of those possibilities, the disappearance of that time, the great abridgment of the popular age. The ghost of a century, a show closing down for lack of interest.. But, he thought, somebody had to be around to tell the story. It was too easy to mock the tag end of it, to do a burlesque on the failure of public joy. Someone ought to show it with a degree of compassion, he thought. Someone ought to have a heart about it.

Stone deliberately lets the mask slip, as it's the writer speaking here rather than the character. The stories preceding "The Archer," arguably are not about compassion or heart, but more about a merciless eye that sees America for what it is in this late time, and crafts his dark fictions accordingly. However, it's Duffy's gesture of reconciliation at the end of the collection that does signal the compassion and heart that the reader has probably been craving since the first story. When it does come, it's not cheap, but well earned. A meaningless gesture (a gift to a clueless college girl) that somehow does mean something to all.