The Stones of Summer

The main character of The Stones of Summer is an amiable genius who accepts and accommodates (and in turn is accepted and accommodated by) a group of decent friends of average abilities with nicknames like "Dunker." The novel is divided into three books. The first is artfully written even though it has some rough edges, especially in the first few pages. It tells the story of the main character's family going back multiple generations on his mother's side. The point of this book seems to be that genius runs in families and makes life interesting but doesn't necessarily solve problems. The book evokes a sense of loss and former (or near) grandeur, and even tragedy, that one normally associates with Fitzgerald or Faulkner. Some of the metaphors misfire, but there is a lyrical quality to the book that makes you feel you're in the presence of a shaman. The main character is only eight years old but converses with his elders as an equal. There is nothing surreal about this. The second book tells the story of the main character's adolescence. This book is raucously funny and has a Mark Twain quality about it. The cameraderie of the main character and his buddies embodies the best that adolescence has to offer; their feckless and reckless boyishness embodies the worst. The treatment of the main character's genius in this book is subtle, but consistent, and I wasn't surprised when the gang is playing pool and a folded piece of paper pulled from the main character's back pocket as he makes a bank shot turns out to be a sensitive poem that his friends ridicule without mercy, to the delight of the entire poolhall. Midway through this book, the narrator says of the main character, "He would always live here, in this place, among these stones, this grass. And he would always be locked up within, the knots of dreams." Yet this book ends with a sense that the main character's destiny will be shaped by his genius and his shamanic insights and his poetry. The meaning of the second book doesn't really sink in until you're well into the third book, which reveals that the main character was only 12 when he was "insane for the first time. He never talked about it. No one knew. Because, you see, that was the first time he knew, as an absolute certainty, he had a soul as big and lovely as Jesus Christ. Also for the first time, he knew and felt the heavenly damnation of that burden, like being caught in the exact center of a baroque operetta, people singing and running off with exploding harps in every direction.... He stood, not believing civilization, yet wanting to come closer, as if he had just seen the Godhead itself rise up nameless and without need of a face, as if he must run and tell us about it now, quickly, before it vanished again into wherever it goes when it isn't here." The main character's genius runs amok in this book, with serious consequences. This is a big book, nearly 600 pages, and it has enough flaws that it requires a certain amount of effort

Some other reviews here do a great job of describing the way the book works in manner much better than I can, so I'll leave that to them. I just want say why I loved it, and why I think so many reviewers would violently disagree with me. This novel blew me away. Some may complain about the unorthadox word choices, but I totally dug that. It's odd, but it works. I didn't just manage to navigate through it, I loved it. There's nothing quite like it in fiction. Probably only in poetry you will find such language. Don't let what people say about how difficult the writing is scare you away from this. If you're having trouble with it, just hang in there, you'll get use to it, and will probably be in love with the novel by page 150. One of the intersting things about the language is how closely it is related to character. This is not a first person story, yet the language of the book is the language of Dawes Williams. The phrases that don't make sense often come to make much more sense, and become incredibly powerful as they reappear later in the book. For example, no one quite gets it when a conversation is described as being like "great wood eyes" in the first paragraph, but at the end of the second book (but don't skip ahead) this means something much more too us. By book three we begin to suspect that this actually is in some ways first person,that the character Dawes Williams is writing the text, or even the author of the book. What is repeated constantly takes on great meaning. Words like wood, water and especially stone. The word stone for me has forever been impacted by this book. It feels like magic to me whenever it comes up in conversation, or in another book. Stone. It's strange. Becuase of this book that word means so so much to me. Mossman's use of language in this book is a lot closer to the way a poet uses language than a fiction writer. At times he picks words that circumvent literal denotative meaning, conscious meaning even, in order to create a feeling, an emotion,that reaches underneath the surface. This will be an easier read for you if you are use to reading poetry. The sheer beauty of the writing at times brought tears to my eyes. Story wise, this book is wonderful. Another thing that might put off some readers is the episodic nature of the plot. What Mossman gives you is snippets of a childhood, so many events are less related to each other than in a conventional novel. The purpose of the book isn't to develop a plot, but to develop a character. But the episodes are wonderfully done, as Mark Moscowitz said, there are so many great stories, often hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking. The way the book is divided between childhood and young adulthood has similarities with Jonathan Lethem's recent book Fortress of Solitude, which I also loved, so if you didn't like the pace in that book, you probably won't like it here. This is possibly the greatest book I've read. My brother and I read it at the same time, and now we

Let me begin by saying that, had I discovered this book on my own, without Mark Moskowittz's STONE READER documentary, I would have been recommending it to every serious reader I know. I approached it with some reservation, expecting to find an overhyped work that had gone out of print for good reason, but I was utterly captivated within the first five pages. Fifty pages in, I was saying "Wow!" Dow Mossman's THE STONES OF SUMMER seems to attract a remarkable degree of vitriol from reviewers. Readers apparently either love it or hate it, perhaps somewhat the way people respond to modern art. It is surely a far from perfect work, but rather than pick nits about individual sentences and images, I found myself reading right through them, accepting them for the atmosphere they create as if I was reading poetry. For me, at least, the story flowed into a larger societal picture that resonated with the sense of betrayal and despair generated by the antiwar, counterculture movement of the late 1960's. THE STONES OF SUMMER is a remarkable first novel, and sadly, an apparently last novel as well. As past reviews suggest, it is also not everyone's cup of tea. This book is not a mindless summer read, nor is it a page-turning thriller. But readers whose tastes run to Saramago, Pynchon, DeLillo, Faulkner, or Garcia Marquez are likely to find Dow Mossman's book intriguing and enjoyable (if less polished), a deeply felt story wrapped in prose so exuberant, so manically transcendent, it practically leaps off the page and grabs you by the throat. Unlike so many popular works (Ludlum, Grisham, King, Cussler, Clancy, etc.) whose stories are as memorable as last week's hot dog, this is a book you will never forget. On its surface, THE STONES OF SUMMER tells the coming of age story of Iowa-born Dawes Oldham Williams (D.O.W.) in three segments. The first takes place when a precocious, eight year old Dawes visits his grandfather's racing greyhound farm during summer vacation, with flashbacks to Dawes' relationship and adventures with a troublemaking friend named Ronnie Crown. The second segment occurs 7-10 years later, during Dawes' rather wild and crazy high school years, ending in tragedy on his last night at home before college. The final section takes place another ten years later and finds Dawes on his way to, and living in, Mexico, still trying to cope with personal losses, hopelessness, and borderline schizophrenia. Each section of the book speaks in its own voice. The opening, 1949-1950 segment is densely written, filled with the soaring, spiraling imagery for which the book is best known. We are introduced to Dawes' ineffectual, Donna Reed mother and nearly as bland stepfather, a dark and imposing grandfather with a hair-trigger temper and dog-eat-dog temperament reminiscent of Joe McCarthy, and a sybil-like neighbor woman named Abigail Winas who raises chickens and all but reads their entrails. The second section, 1956-1961, is more chronologically to

The Stones of Summer went down like a blood transfusion; hot! hot! hot! I laughed to see that some of the reviews were porking Mossman with the name of Proust: ironically, that's just what the Dawes' childhood friends would have said, little chuckleheads--- and they'd be wrong and Dawes loves 'em for trying. No, I saw every writer in this Writer: Mossman is Virginia Woolf, Miguel Angel Asturias, James Joyce, Cervantes, Mark Twain, Keri Hume (for me). This is great Midwestern literature. I feel I've been gifted with the reprint of this book, and I hope it never goes out of print again. Through the vehicles of wit, poetry, and brainstuff, the novel becomes in the end, a soul on paper. It is a must-read for all writers and serious readers. I'm buying a copy my struggling artist friends and for my grandpa, let's see if he can take the kick!

I, like a lot of people, read this book after seeing "Stone Reader." Basically, I wanted to know what kind of book would inspire such a great movie. The answer to that is complicated, but the upshot is that I enjoyed reading this book very much. The three parts of this book have very different styles from each other. The first part reads more like poetry than prose. There are rich descriptions that leave more of an impression rather than a telling. The second part focuses on dialog with much fewer descriptions. I found the dialogs to be very real. The third part uses out-of-time-line narrative, writings (including the start of a novel) by the main character, letters from other characters, and other techniques. The overall impression is that this novel is like James Joyce's Ulysses: a massive and well-constructed work. I am amazed that a first-time writer could create this book.As to the story, there can be no doubt that the main character has few redeeming values; he is difficult to like. He and his "friends" (does he really form any real relationships with anyone?) do many violent and vicious things to themselves and others. How can you like that? In some ways, though, Dawes Williams reminds me of Ignatius Reilly in "A Confederacy of Dunces". Both characters are quite repulsive. Ignatius has none of Dawes' violent nature. Where Ignatius' life seems to always backfire on him, Dawes' life seems to result from Dawes' explicit attack on it. Repulsive, violent, vicious--what's to like about that?For me, though, I like the book. I find the construction and prose to be incredible. There is a wit and creativity behind this book I admire even if I don't admire the characters in it.