The Stones of Summer [Hardcover]

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.

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 told in somewhat more straightforward prose and dialog, suggesting the sexual and cultural revolution just then beginning. The final section, 1967-1968, is almost hallucinatory, filled with journal writings, letters, a short novel by Dawes, and a story line about sanity, drugs, Vietnam, and the sexual revolution.

THE STONES OF SUMMER deals with the great American awakening from 1950 to 1968, culminating with the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the death of American innocence. It is a novel about personal identity and individuality, alienation, the role of history (both personal and national), and the relativity of truth. In the end, it is also a story of rebellion against tradition and cultural mores and the burdens falling upon those who rebel. The message is classic, the execution is powerful, the story is tragic. Writing in 1972, Mossman proved prescient about the absurdity of American culture and political values, going so far as to conjecture about the ridiculous notion of Ronald Reagan as a President! Dawes Williams would have laughed until he cried if he had seen what has come to pass with the Bush Administration's manufacturing of its own history with regard to Iraq: WMD's, toppling Saddam's statue, Jessica Lynch, the Thanksgiving turkey, "Mission Accomplished," "We're making good progress. They all love us," and the like. He had seen the enemy, and it was us. Aaatttssssss Dawes!

There is certainly room for valid criticism of this book. The female characters lack depth, the prose is sometimes just too extravagant, the literary allusions lack subtlety, some of the dialog is pretentious to the point of self-parody, and the Huck Finn references (particularly Dawes having a girlfriend named Becky Thatcher) are overplayed. Yet despite these drawbacks, Dow Mossman masterfully captures America's own coming of age story in a way few authors have.

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 to steam through. Even so, I would put it on a par with A Confederacy of Dunces as a book of ideas and as the product of a Platonist genius. I would put it on a part with Look Homeward, Angel, as the work of someone observant of and intoxicated by the life within and without him. It is one of the most remarkable and most memorable first novels that I've ever read. Dow, you're lost and by the wind grieved. Come back again!