Product Description

Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's extraordinary debut is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that developed a passionate cult following. It recently inspired the award-winning documentary film Stone Reader, described by Peter Rainer of New York magazine as "a marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever."

Rendered with breathtaking artistry and emotional depth, The Stones of Summer captures the beauty and pain of postwar America. Its vivid evocation of culture-void Iowa in the ’50s and ’60s reveals in layer after layer of richly observed detail the maturation—the very soul—of an artist. Its rediscovery was the catalyst for one filmmaker to confront his faith in the power of great literature to endure, and it can now be embraced by readers everywhere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #753908 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-24
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

From Publishers Weekly
After its 1972 publication, this sprawling, modernist Great American Novel-style epic garnered its author critical comparison to Faulkner, for its saga of rural dynastic decline; Salinger, for its mood of youthful alienation; and Joyce, for its labyrinthine, cryptically allusive, stream-of-consciousness renditions of the private psyche. The episodic coming-of-age narrative follows budding writer Dawes Williams from boyhood on his grandfather's greyhound ranch, through a feckless Iowa adolescence of drinking and joyriding, to a mentally unstable adulthood in which, through rants against propriety, positivism and the establishment and a terminal bout of countercultural dissoluteness in Mexico, he becomes the voice of the 1960s' lost generation. The real action, though, is the development of Dawes's writerly sensibility, his-i.e., the author's-knack for transmuting the dross of reality into the gold of literary metaphor. But Mossman's own lyrical, metaphorical sensibility tends toward pseudo-profundities ("[h]er body was an inward fall, a deep spiral of musky sea lying easily within itself"), abstractions ("[s]he had a metaphysical eye, as blue as perfect nightmares"), and a synesthetic scrambling of sensory categories ("[h]e felt he could not listen to the light anymore, that it stood off in the distance, wordless with impossible opinion"). Long out of print before this reissue, the novel has generated a cult following among those who find in its inchoate but intense imagery the very portrait of the young artist's soul. But many readers may find the book's hallucinatory prose-"In the beginning there was me, green smoke and oatmeal, conscious light, all looking for a shoe to rise from"-interesting but self-indulgent, and the plot insufficiently gripping.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"A marvelous book... it burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon-fire, stone-fire." -- John Seelye, The New York Times Book Review

Review
“A marvelous book... it burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon-fire, stone-fire.” (John Seelye, The New York Times Book Review)

Customer Reviews

A Modern Classic
Like most people, I saw the documentary. Like most people, I bought the book because of the documentary. I saw the programme on BBC4 and ordered the book through the UK wing of Amazon. Quite frankly, I don't know what is going on with both the reviewers and the people who rate the reviews. There is clearly an orchestrated campaign against this book. How else can a two sentence"review" giving the book one star be rated as helpful by so many people? And yet if someone is positive and gives a detailed and thought-out explanation as to why they think the book has merit they get canned? It is actually quite depressing to see so much ignorance and vitriol aimed at a book. It is particularly depressing that a person can only read 10 pages of a book and think they are therefore in a position to provide an informed critique.

There is no doubt that Mossman is a great visionary writer. His mixing of styles and narrative turns present a challenge to the majority of readers who may well be used to reading their book club's recommended read. Whilst the book needs some careful editing to clear itself of some of the more self-indulgent aspects of Mossman's writing, it is without doubt the most important American novel I have read in 5 or 6 years. The downward spiral that Dawes finds himself in is told with great wit, great pathos, with an intellectual vigour that frightens as much as it compels, and, the mark of any great artist, with real truth. I only hope Mossman breaks his writer's block and tries to create something else as worthwhile and important. I only hope he does not have to read some of the poisonous nonsense written about his work.

I expect to have lots of negative ratings of my review within the next week. Predictable and tiresome......

An amazing book! Ulysses meets a Confederacy of Dunces
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.

A Remarkable and Unforgettable Book
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.