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The Stones of Summer
Coming of age story, set in Iowa, in the 1950s and 60s.
586 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
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October 9, 2014
Surfacing Stones
That a text has been Buried tells us nothing of its quality. That it has been vigorously UnBuried 30 years later by passionate readers should, however, give us pause.
The Stones of Summer was published in 1972, with its author suffering a nervous breakdown during the period of its completion and publication. It was well reviewed. Its publisher, however, filed for bankruptcy soon after and the book fell quickly and quietly out of print. Its author had worked as a welder for 19 years prior to publication and, following his recovery and release from an Iowa sanatorium, spent the next years looking after his aging mother and working as a paper bundler for a local newspaper. He has never published another word.
I heard of the book through a mention by Joseph McElroy (see here http://www.raintaxi.com/failure-build... ) and, through subsequent research, discovered that it had been re-printed in 2003 following the success of a documentary ("Stone Reader") about the book and its author.
I am very glad that I did.
It is a masterpiece, a flawed one, but a masterpiece no less.
As the many 1 and 5 star reviews will attest, you will either love or hate his prose. So here are some samples (and remember – we are coming from a unseated, unsettled mind – one should not expect the linear or the logical from such a world-view)
"There is this night, the white spines of trees round and worn and torn like stone eyes, heavy, unspun, twisted with all of it, because this is an old land and already tired and full of stories, white graves, black houses and people who tell stories in the evenings so old, older than paper, funny as operas, so broken with light you can hardly see them, any of them, but you know they are here - they are pure-dee here in your singing blood. . . "
"They walked along alone together. Walt Disney himself smiled after in the heavens, with unbelievable pearly teeth, with red dancing angels and green flying fairies, with hair as slick as a riverboat gambler's, with deific head bigger than all the oil money in Texas. ... he was their patron saint, a gold, shiny medallion winking over and hung from the sky. They walked down streets as quiet as falling names."
"Then the last night train moving on Omaha rose and fell, a second, a late final stone fusing it all, a wall, sound, with the far-moving song of a last bitch dog, dark bones and ridges, fixed to the high spine of the hill."
"There he developed a purer passion for a girl named Becky Thatcher. The irony was terrific, but he didn't care, that was her name. She smelt of dancing cinnamon moving about on the burned edge of dark rooms. They waltzed in the long, innocent cavern together. She watched him play baseball. He walked her home along the wet cement, in the rain. He didn't care. He loved her like God and the Angels. He recognized himself to be Andy Hardy, Henry Alridge, Beaver Cleaver. He didn't care. He was out of his mind. They talked, he thought. At the end of two endless months he kissed her quietly."
There is lyricism here and almost surrealist dream-logic to the metaphors and similes at times. This seems to put some people off. Personally it felt very "true" to a certain type of consciousness to me, Like Kavan shot through with Lispector and a bit of Kerouac and some Stegner, and echoes of Under the Volcano in the final section, all shook together and flung out into the mid-west darkness. The writing develops in step with the consciousness of Dawes - he is 8 or 9 in the first book, about 15-18 in the second, and in his mid to late twenties in the third. He suffers a significant mental breakdown between the 2nd and 3rd books, and the techniques used shift dramatically (many of you experienced PoMo readers will find this 3rd section easier than some seem to have done). I found all three sections to be deeply impressive pieces of work. However, from the reviews below, I can see that some struggled with the first and loved the second, and vice-versa, but the final part seems to have caused the most problems. There can be found Dawes within Dawes within Dawes - metafiction, novels within novels, transcriptions of real letters from friends in Vietnam etc. Either this works for you or it doesn't.
My only advice for those approaching this text is to give it time and space to be itself - allow its voice to spend time in your blood and see if the infection takes hold.
It is a novel full of decay and collapse, but of life too. It is very American in that way - the dreaming and the breaking apart. Funny too, particularly in the middle section.
So, put simply, you may hate this book or you may love it, I have no way of knowing, but I would certainly suggesting giving it a try.
That a text has been Buried tells us nothing of its quality. That it has been vigorously UnBuried 30 years later by passionate readers should, however, give us pause.
The Stones of Summer was published in 1972, with its author suffering a nervous breakdown during the period of its completion and publication. It was well reviewed. Its publisher, however, filed for bankruptcy soon after and the book fell quickly and quietly out of print. Its author had worked as a welder for 19 years prior to publication and, following his recovery and release from an Iowa sanatorium, spent the next years looking after his aging mother and working as a paper bundler for a local newspaper. He has never published another word.
I heard of the book through a mention by Joseph McElroy (see here http://www.raintaxi.com/failure-build... ) and, through subsequent research, discovered that it had been re-printed in 2003 following the success of a documentary ("Stone Reader") about the book and its author.
I am very glad that I did.
It is a masterpiece, a flawed one, but a masterpiece no less.
As the many 1 and 5 star reviews will attest, you will either love or hate his prose. So here are some samples (and remember – we are coming from a unseated, unsettled mind – one should not expect the linear or the logical from such a world-view)
"There is this night, the white spines of trees round and worn and torn like stone eyes, heavy, unspun, twisted with all of it, because this is an old land and already tired and full of stories, white graves, black houses and people who tell stories in the evenings so old, older than paper, funny as operas, so broken with light you can hardly see them, any of them, but you know they are here - they are pure-dee here in your singing blood. . . "
"They walked along alone together. Walt Disney himself smiled after in the heavens, with unbelievable pearly teeth, with red dancing angels and green flying fairies, with hair as slick as a riverboat gambler's, with deific head bigger than all the oil money in Texas. ... he was their patron saint, a gold, shiny medallion winking over and hung from the sky. They walked down streets as quiet as falling names."
"Then the last night train moving on Omaha rose and fell, a second, a late final stone fusing it all, a wall, sound, with the far-moving song of a last bitch dog, dark bones and ridges, fixed to the high spine of the hill."
"There he developed a purer passion for a girl named Becky Thatcher. The irony was terrific, but he didn't care, that was her name. She smelt of dancing cinnamon moving about on the burned edge of dark rooms. They waltzed in the long, innocent cavern together. She watched him play baseball. He walked her home along the wet cement, in the rain. He didn't care. He loved her like God and the Angels. He recognized himself to be Andy Hardy, Henry Alridge, Beaver Cleaver. He didn't care. He was out of his mind. They talked, he thought. At the end of two endless months he kissed her quietly."
There is lyricism here and almost surrealist dream-logic to the metaphors and similes at times. This seems to put some people off. Personally it felt very "true" to a certain type of consciousness to me, Like Kavan shot through with Lispector and a bit of Kerouac and some Stegner, and echoes of Under the Volcano in the final section, all shook together and flung out into the mid-west darkness. The writing develops in step with the consciousness of Dawes - he is 8 or 9 in the first book, about 15-18 in the second, and in his mid to late twenties in the third. He suffers a significant mental breakdown between the 2nd and 3rd books, and the techniques used shift dramatically (many of you experienced PoMo readers will find this 3rd section easier than some seem to have done). I found all three sections to be deeply impressive pieces of work. However, from the reviews below, I can see that some struggled with the first and loved the second, and vice-versa, but the final part seems to have caused the most problems. There can be found Dawes within Dawes within Dawes - metafiction, novels within novels, transcriptions of real letters from friends in Vietnam etc. Either this works for you or it doesn't.
My only advice for those approaching this text is to give it time and space to be itself - allow its voice to spend time in your blood and see if the infection takes hold.
It is a novel full of decay and collapse, but of life too. It is very American in that way - the dreaming and the breaking apart. Funny too, particularly in the middle section.
So, put simply, you may hate this book or you may love it, I have no way of knowing, but I would certainly suggesting giving it a try.
March 11, 2025
Six months in the making, my epic interview with Dow Mossman is now available! Over 20,000 words of scintillating conversation with the author of the 1972 great American novel, The Stones of Summer, which is truly one of the most extraordinary reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. A phenomenal example of American magical realist prose. See my friend Joseph McElroy’s blurb on the 2003 Barnes & Noble reprint.
Dow and I talk about the Shakespeare controversy, his experience of working on The Stones of Summer for about a decade till he had a nervous breakdown, the other novels he should have written, deeply nostalgic memories that were part of a missing prologue to his only novel, the sociological importance of Melville, Faulkner’s swarm, the 2001 documentary Stone Reader and how it turned him into a celebrity overnight, the secret history of America, and much more.
For someone who wrote one novel, one masterpiece fifty years ago, Dow is still bursting with stories and passion at 80 years old.
A heavily abridged version of the interview is available for free, but this mega-version of our exchange is exclusively for Patreon supporters. From transcribing to research, this project took countless hours of hard work, so consider supporting: https://www.patreon.com/posts/shiveri...
Here is the free version: https://thecollidescope.com/2023/08/1...
Dow was kind enough to sign my rare first edition of the novel and my limited edition of the Stone Reader DVD.
Finally, here's my essay on The Stones of Summer: https://thecollidescope.com/2025/02/2...
My interview with the filmmaker behind Stone Reader, Mark Moskowitz, can be read for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2023/05/2...
Dow and I talk about the Shakespeare controversy, his experience of working on The Stones of Summer for about a decade till he had a nervous breakdown, the other novels he should have written, deeply nostalgic memories that were part of a missing prologue to his only novel, the sociological importance of Melville, Faulkner’s swarm, the 2001 documentary Stone Reader and how it turned him into a celebrity overnight, the secret history of America, and much more.
For someone who wrote one novel, one masterpiece fifty years ago, Dow is still bursting with stories and passion at 80 years old.
A heavily abridged version of the interview is available for free, but this mega-version of our exchange is exclusively for Patreon supporters. From transcribing to research, this project took countless hours of hard work, so consider supporting: https://www.patreon.com/posts/shiveri...
Here is the free version: https://thecollidescope.com/2023/08/1...
Dow was kind enough to sign my rare first edition of the novel and my limited edition of the Stone Reader DVD.
Finally, here's my essay on The Stones of Summer: https://thecollidescope.com/2025/02/2...
My interview with the filmmaker behind Stone Reader, Mark Moskowitz, can be read for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2023/05/2...
February 27, 2018
Well.
I added this to my shelves six years ago when I was collecting books for my Around the USA project (I found other books for Iowa.)
I added this to my shelves six years ago when the jazz piano professor sat in a chair in my office and proclaimed it the best novel of all time, not only that his favorite novel, not only that he would reread it if I'd read it (I did not.)
I was inspired by this year's Instagram-fueled unread shelf project to spend more time on my own books, then reading friend Jason said he'd read it with me (signs point to not), then I declared it a Misfit Readers book, where only one person followed me almost all the way to the end (I predict she has made it this far, she might skim through to the end.)
I watched the documentary film that caused this book to come out of obscurity and receive a reprinting courtesy of Barnes and Noble after 30 years of zero attention, and I can see why it made people curious about the book. One man singlehandedly connected a bunch of readers together and talked about books that were formative for him and other white men who came of age in the 60s and 70s. That really was such a powerful time in American literature.
And I really think this novel is more of a reflection ofthis fact, rather than a major contributor. Sure, some who read it when they were themselves coming of age, from rural backgrounds, resisting military service, rejecting their parents, trading it all in for the fantasy of the life of the writer.... this is going to really connect with that idealism. But as Dow Mossman himself says in the documentary, he wasn't done revising it. It was like they took it from him before it was done. (I think he would have made it even longer, unfortunately.)
There are some great pieces here. Good writing about nature. Interesting characters. But it needs editing, it needs shape, it needs... a point. The third part with the multiple genres being examined by future Dawes in Mexico with a beautiful woman are excruciating (and not just because of the bad font choices.)
It isn't worth the effort, in my opinion. And I really did make that effort. I also suspect I'm not the audience. But I wasn't the audience for Moby Dick or Gravity's Rainbow and I would say I enjoyed both of those (sometimes excruciating, sometimes frustrating) novels more than this.
I added this to my shelves six years ago when I was collecting books for my Around the USA project (I found other books for Iowa.)
I added this to my shelves six years ago when the jazz piano professor sat in a chair in my office and proclaimed it the best novel of all time, not only that his favorite novel, not only that he would reread it if I'd read it (I did not.)
I was inspired by this year's Instagram-fueled unread shelf project to spend more time on my own books, then reading friend Jason said he'd read it with me (signs point to not), then I declared it a Misfit Readers book, where only one person followed me almost all the way to the end (I predict she has made it this far, she might skim through to the end.)
I watched the documentary film that caused this book to come out of obscurity and receive a reprinting courtesy of Barnes and Noble after 30 years of zero attention, and I can see why it made people curious about the book. One man singlehandedly connected a bunch of readers together and talked about books that were formative for him and other white men who came of age in the 60s and 70s. That really was such a powerful time in American literature.
And I really think this novel is more of a reflection ofthis fact, rather than a major contributor. Sure, some who read it when they were themselves coming of age, from rural backgrounds, resisting military service, rejecting their parents, trading it all in for the fantasy of the life of the writer.... this is going to really connect with that idealism. But as Dow Mossman himself says in the documentary, he wasn't done revising it. It was like they took it from him before it was done. (I think he would have made it even longer, unfortunately.)
There are some great pieces here. Good writing about nature. Interesting characters. But it needs editing, it needs shape, it needs... a point. The third part with the multiple genres being examined by future Dawes in Mexico with a beautiful woman are excruciating (and not just because of the bad font choices.)
It isn't worth the effort, in my opinion. And I really did make that effort. I also suspect I'm not the audience. But I wasn't the audience for Moby Dick or Gravity's Rainbow and I would say I enjoyed both of those (sometimes excruciating, sometimes frustrating) novels more than this.
June 1, 2007
The inspiring story of an inexplicably angry child who grows into a "sensitive" teenage poet who enjoys getting drunk and setting people's houses on fire and finally a pretentious, ungrateful dick who moves to Mexico because his parents just don't understand him, man. If he were alive today he would be the guy in flip-flops who kept taking his pants off at the Super Bowl party I went to in Astoria this year.
Parts of it are well-written but it all adds up to far less than the sum of these parts and the bad parts, which are more abundant anyway. The parts where he and his hippie sex goddess alternately "read" his incoherent "novel" are especially contrived, as they seem to read at a pace of five pages per eight hours, if the narrative is to be believed. Recommended for people who think frat boys deserve their own On The Road.
Parts of it are well-written but it all adds up to far less than the sum of these parts and the bad parts, which are more abundant anyway. The parts where he and his hippie sex goddess alternately "read" his incoherent "novel" are especially contrived, as they seem to read at a pace of five pages per eight hours, if the narrative is to be believed. Recommended for people who think frat boys deserve their own On The Road.
April 25, 2011
Stones Of Summer is a strange, muddy novel that has a very debatable importance. The only reason that this book is known by a wide audience (wide being absolutely anyone who reads) is from a film titled Stone Reader. In the film Mark Moskowitz goes on a quest of sorts to find more about a beloved book (Stones Of Summer) that he read when he was much younger. The strange thing about the book is that it received an enthusiastically positive review in the New York Times after it was published and then promptly fell out of collective consciousness. Moskowitz read the review and decided that had to read this wonderful book. He loved it but apparently he was the only one. Now older, anyone that he attempts to discuss "Stones Of Summer" with has no idea of the book that he is talking about. But not anymore.
The movie is actually very charming and would be found interesting by anyone who enjoys literature in the least. It brings out a love that you might have of a particular book and also asks questions of what other literary gems have been lost to time and apathy? I watched the film and my reaction was similar to when Moskowitz read that New York Times Book Review so many years ago, I have to get my hands on this book! But when I did my excitement did not last.
The book is in three parts and to simplify it, the first part is very good and interesting, the second being less so and the third just completely devolves into a near unreadable mess. The story begins with a boy, Dawes Williams, and his trip with his mother and step-father on a trip to see his grandfather. There is a large focus on his relationship with his step-father and how Dawes views the world around him. The second act chronicles his late teenage years where Dawes and his friends engage in drinking, sex and violence. It has a very On The Road feel where the protagonists sole existence is to go from one party to the next. The third part has a more elusive plot due to the very cryptic and scattered way it was written. Dawes now lives in Mexico and suffers from schizophrenia. Much of this section is filled with his writings and they are extraordinarily difficult to get through. Beat-like and vague, the words meander page after page. The ideas are unclear and everything seems covered in this literary muck. To be honest I began skipping a lot of it because of how pointless it seemed; my patience had run out and I just wanted to be done with the book.
In all fairness Stones Of Summer does show brief glimpses of excellence but they occur mostly at the beginning. If there was more of those in the second part it might have persuaded me to try to decode everything in the third and have a more enjoyable experience with the book. It just reminded me too much of On The Road, a book I had a lot of trouble with.
Though, I still believe that this is still an important artifact. I wrestled with myself whether I should give it one star or two; which seems really harsh, I know. The whole story behind the story is what interests me more. Boy reads book, boy loves book, boy shares forgotten book with the world. Moskowitz, I believe single-handedly brought this work back into literary consciousness in a way that no one could or, to be honest, would. What of our cherished book that only we appreciate it seems? What if we could share that with everyone in hopes that they would see what we see? But then on the other hand, maybe things are forgotten for a reason.
I'm glad that Mossman wrote this book. Yes, you read that correctly. I'm glad that he wrote it because he wanted to write it. It was the only novel that he wrote and it was the only novel that he needed to write. It is here because he willed it into existence and at the very least, that is an inspiration to me.
The movie is actually very charming and would be found interesting by anyone who enjoys literature in the least. It brings out a love that you might have of a particular book and also asks questions of what other literary gems have been lost to time and apathy? I watched the film and my reaction was similar to when Moskowitz read that New York Times Book Review so many years ago, I have to get my hands on this book! But when I did my excitement did not last.
The book is in three parts and to simplify it, the first part is very good and interesting, the second being less so and the third just completely devolves into a near unreadable mess. The story begins with a boy, Dawes Williams, and his trip with his mother and step-father on a trip to see his grandfather. There is a large focus on his relationship with his step-father and how Dawes views the world around him. The second act chronicles his late teenage years where Dawes and his friends engage in drinking, sex and violence. It has a very On The Road feel where the protagonists sole existence is to go from one party to the next. The third part has a more elusive plot due to the very cryptic and scattered way it was written. Dawes now lives in Mexico and suffers from schizophrenia. Much of this section is filled with his writings and they are extraordinarily difficult to get through. Beat-like and vague, the words meander page after page. The ideas are unclear and everything seems covered in this literary muck. To be honest I began skipping a lot of it because of how pointless it seemed; my patience had run out and I just wanted to be done with the book.
In all fairness Stones Of Summer does show brief glimpses of excellence but they occur mostly at the beginning. If there was more of those in the second part it might have persuaded me to try to decode everything in the third and have a more enjoyable experience with the book. It just reminded me too much of On The Road, a book I had a lot of trouble with.
Though, I still believe that this is still an important artifact. I wrestled with myself whether I should give it one star or two; which seems really harsh, I know. The whole story behind the story is what interests me more. Boy reads book, boy loves book, boy shares forgotten book with the world. Moskowitz, I believe single-handedly brought this work back into literary consciousness in a way that no one could or, to be honest, would. What of our cherished book that only we appreciate it seems? What if we could share that with everyone in hopes that they would see what we see? But then on the other hand, maybe things are forgotten for a reason.
I'm glad that Mossman wrote this book. Yes, you read that correctly. I'm glad that he wrote it because he wanted to write it. It was the only novel that he wrote and it was the only novel that he needed to write. It is here because he willed it into existence and at the very least, that is an inspiration to me.
July 25, 2008
Wow. I finally finished this wicked beast. It was beautiful. Difficult. Fantastic and haunted, funny and sad, real and damn nuts.
I don't really know how to react, other than read it again. I think I have to. Perhaps next summer. Mossman's prose is challenging. Abstract enough that I felt like I had been re-reading the same pages for hours. And, in many cases, I was.
I probably reread about 2/3 of the book, and only in the waning chapters did I achieve my balance. For me, it is very disorienting. You will need to find your "sea legs."
What I take away from the sprawling book is many vignettes of a troubled, soaring, and silly as hell life. I relate directly and indirectly to the lives lived and lost, the passage of time, the grandiose American spirit and the crushing acceptance of the reality of American life. The intelligence and humanity in this story are astounding. As is the self-indulgent sprawl of it all... Mossman's style included.
I am left feeling like this story buzzed by me, leaving moments and primal, visceral feelings that are so much like our own experiences over a lifetime, you wonder if you are staring straight ahead or looking back. You pull together lucid memories, tinted memories. Memories that make sense, and those that are woven with uncertainty. Clarity comes fleeting. That is how this story wove it's way into me, almost became me at moments, and allowed for true reflection in mirrors flying past at 100 miles per hour. Then fizzled out into nothing.
Wow.
I don't really know how to react, other than read it again. I think I have to. Perhaps next summer. Mossman's prose is challenging. Abstract enough that I felt like I had been re-reading the same pages for hours. And, in many cases, I was.
I probably reread about 2/3 of the book, and only in the waning chapters did I achieve my balance. For me, it is very disorienting. You will need to find your "sea legs."
What I take away from the sprawling book is many vignettes of a troubled, soaring, and silly as hell life. I relate directly and indirectly to the lives lived and lost, the passage of time, the grandiose American spirit and the crushing acceptance of the reality of American life. The intelligence and humanity in this story are astounding. As is the self-indulgent sprawl of it all... Mossman's style included.
I am left feeling like this story buzzed by me, leaving moments and primal, visceral feelings that are so much like our own experiences over a lifetime, you wonder if you are staring straight ahead or looking back. You pull together lucid memories, tinted memories. Memories that make sense, and those that are woven with uncertainty. Clarity comes fleeting. That is how this story wove it's way into me, almost became me at moments, and allowed for true reflection in mirrors flying past at 100 miles per hour. Then fizzled out into nothing.
Wow.
April 19, 2017
Good lord above. This author is either a genius or insane. Most likely a combination. I realize that he had to be committed to a psychiatric facility when the book was finished but still 1400 pages. His editor cut out half of it without Dow's input. Basically an introvert, I feel certain that he poured all of his pent up emotions into his main character, Dawes, and depleted his emotional resources. Vietnam, drugs, insane escapades, depression, poverty, friendship, love, family, loss. It's all there--and so much more.
It's so lame to say it's a coming of age story although it certainly is. It's this lyrical, dense, often impossible to follow narrative that uses words in ways I've NEVER encountered. The plot is expertly woven into the surrounding word tsunamis. I was sometimes lost for 20 pages at a time yet somehow the words carried me along. The author was always in control and I was just along for the ride. I became immersed in a world that was unfamiliar yet captivating. The language was experimental, woozy, eccentric, often impossible for me to absorb. Yet there was no pretense, just a strong desire to knock down linguistic boundaries.
My attempt to describe this book is ridiculously inept. I've given it 4 instead of 5 stars because of my deficits not the book's. I sometimes got weary of the sensory processing overload.
This book was published in 1972 by Bobbs-Merrill, a publishing house that went bankrupt. It got a rave review from the NYT but was not widely read and went out of print for 30 years. Mark Moskowitz, a film-maker, loved the book and went on a quest to find the reclusive author Dow Mossman. He documents this is his 2003 film, The Stone Reader which also celebrates books and reading. (It's a great film!) I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Moskowitz last night at the new theatre in West Chester PA, Uptown. He has totally changed Dow's future as he was living in poverty until Mark rediscovered him and got the book reprinted by Barnes and Noble as part of The Lost Books project.
Give it a try. I'm pretty sure that you'll either love it or hate it.
It's so lame to say it's a coming of age story although it certainly is. It's this lyrical, dense, often impossible to follow narrative that uses words in ways I've NEVER encountered. The plot is expertly woven into the surrounding word tsunamis. I was sometimes lost for 20 pages at a time yet somehow the words carried me along. The author was always in control and I was just along for the ride. I became immersed in a world that was unfamiliar yet captivating. The language was experimental, woozy, eccentric, often impossible for me to absorb. Yet there was no pretense, just a strong desire to knock down linguistic boundaries.
My attempt to describe this book is ridiculously inept. I've given it 4 instead of 5 stars because of my deficits not the book's. I sometimes got weary of the sensory processing overload.
This book was published in 1972 by Bobbs-Merrill, a publishing house that went bankrupt. It got a rave review from the NYT but was not widely read and went out of print for 30 years. Mark Moskowitz, a film-maker, loved the book and went on a quest to find the reclusive author Dow Mossman. He documents this is his 2003 film, The Stone Reader which also celebrates books and reading. (It's a great film!) I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Moskowitz last night at the new theatre in West Chester PA, Uptown. He has totally changed Dow's future as he was living in poverty until Mark rediscovered him and got the book reprinted by Barnes and Noble as part of The Lost Books project.
Give it a try. I'm pretty sure that you'll either love it or hate it.
January 7, 2008
Like any long trip, the first half of the journey is a bit uncomfortable and skeptical. Half way through you realize that you've learned so much that the rest of the ride is full of longing to see just where it is you are heading. Finally when you arrive you become quite aware that getting to the end is fullfilling, yet the adventure is in the journey. Mossman shows the awkwardness of impressionable youth, and the pains of coming to age, like no other author has. Is it dangerous to become too intelligent? Just read how Daws, the main character, is afflicted with a volatile mix of deep rooted mania, and over zealous use of knowledge gained and shared. Fantastically exhausting to read, but worth every word.
Want to read
March 14, 2011Stephen King says: "If 20th-century America produced a book of ''Moby Dick'' stature, it's probably this one...but don't let that stop you, or even slow you down. All I mean is that like Melville's fish story, this is one whale of a tale that has somehow found an audience in spite of mind-boggling hurdles, including going out of print (Bobbs-Merrill quit doing fiction not long after it published ''The Stones of Summer'' in 1972) and only a smattering of reviews. Nor was the author exactly up to a PR tour; when his only book was published, Mossman was still recovering from a nervous breakdown he suffered after finishing his 10-year labor of love/hate.
The novel is difficult to get into -- the first 30 pages read like an extended set of Bob Dylan liner notes from 1965. But then pure narration takes over, and readers are treated to a magical mystery tour of adolescent life in America's heartland during the '60s. Because Mossman is a poet as well as a crack storyteller, the result is both lyrical and gripping: Think Jim Morrison crossed with J.D. Salinger. Oh, and sometimes it's fall-on-the-floor funny, too."
The novel is difficult to get into -- the first 30 pages read like an extended set of Bob Dylan liner notes from 1965. But then pure narration takes over, and readers are treated to a magical mystery tour of adolescent life in America's heartland during the '60s. Because Mossman is a poet as well as a crack storyteller, the result is both lyrical and gripping: Think Jim Morrison crossed with J.D. Salinger. Oh, and sometimes it's fall-on-the-floor funny, too."
August 2, 2017
READ. THIS. BOOK.
Easily in my top 3 of the year.
Easily in my top 3 of the year.
March 30, 2007
I'm not going to lie, this book takes time to read, time to like, time to comprehend. It grows on you, though. Mossman is also guilty of some of the faults for which I slammed JSF-- namely faux-poetry, faux-profundity. I guess I let him off the hook because he wrote it thirty years before JSF, went insane afterwards, and works as a welder in Iowa, where he lives in his childhood home. As opposed to, y'know, million dollar advances and buying a brownstone in Park Slope. Not that I can fault an author for success, I guess it's just more difficult for me to find an author genuine who is sitting pretty than one for whom the process of writing and uncovering their soul proved too much to bear.
But to the book...
Stones of Summer is written in three sections: the first is Dawes Williams as a young boy visiting his grandfather, Arthur--an irascible old man who breeds greyhounds. The first section reminded me of Henry Roth's "Call it Sleep" for the manner with which Mossman captures the psyche of a lonely young boy, trying to make sense of the world around him.
The second section was my favorite, concerning mainly the exploits of Dawes and his best buddies just after high school. They're all a little slacker, a little hipster and a little beatnik but ultimately very akin to Kerouac's 'Roman Candles' in their exuberance for living and being young. And as with any faults in classical literature, tragedy is always lurking near the end.
The third and final section concerns Dawes drinking himself to death ten years after the second section, on a beach in Mexico. While he slips in and out of consciousness, he remembers and reflects on his life while carrying on a continuing conversation with a young prostitute.
The final section was the most difficult to get through--often impentrable. I was able to slog through it, however, because Mossman does such a terrific job making me care about Dawes Williams.
All in all, a necessary read, I think, if you're up to the challenge.
But to the book...
Stones of Summer is written in three sections: the first is Dawes Williams as a young boy visiting his grandfather, Arthur--an irascible old man who breeds greyhounds. The first section reminded me of Henry Roth's "Call it Sleep" for the manner with which Mossman captures the psyche of a lonely young boy, trying to make sense of the world around him.
The second section was my favorite, concerning mainly the exploits of Dawes and his best buddies just after high school. They're all a little slacker, a little hipster and a little beatnik but ultimately very akin to Kerouac's 'Roman Candles' in their exuberance for living and being young. And as with any faults in classical literature, tragedy is always lurking near the end.
The third and final section concerns Dawes drinking himself to death ten years after the second section, on a beach in Mexico. While he slips in and out of consciousness, he remembers and reflects on his life while carrying on a continuing conversation with a young prostitute.
The final section was the most difficult to get through--often impentrable. I was able to slog through it, however, because Mossman does such a terrific job making me care about Dawes Williams.
All in all, a necessary read, I think, if you're up to the challenge.
April 13, 2018
This is what happens when disillusioned hippies try to write while still suffering the aftereffects of their acid trips. Mossman's word vomit is full of similes that don't make sense within the context of sentences. "Like" is used a LOT. I suspect he has confused cows/sheep/horses with greyhounds because of the bit about his grandfather turning his greyhounds out to pasture every day and calling them home in the evening. Git along little doggies.
This is my third try at reading this tome over the years. After attempting to slog through the first chapter, I fail to see the genius or literary intelligence in the writing. All I can see is someone who abused his thesaurus waaaaaaaaaaay too much. And probably drugs as well. Remember kids, friends don't let friends use a thesaurus while drunk. Or high. The result is not as much "high-brow literature" (pun intended) as it is "what the hell were you ON when you wrote this? And what the hell was your publishing house on when it decided to publish this?"
This is my third try at reading this tome over the years. After attempting to slog through the first chapter, I fail to see the genius or literary intelligence in the writing. All I can see is someone who abused his thesaurus waaaaaaaaaaay too much. And probably drugs as well. Remember kids, friends don't let friends use a thesaurus while drunk. Or high. The result is not as much "high-brow literature" (pun intended) as it is "what the hell were you ON when you wrote this? And what the hell was your publishing house on when it decided to publish this?"
June 19, 2012
ugh! i was working at barnes & noble when steve riggio decided to drag this back out of the grave it had been rightfully buried in. i remember when our store manager came over and told us it was a corporate initiative for everyone to "at least try to read it." we tried...we failed. and many of our colleagues around the country failed also. sometimes good books get overlooked their first go round, but not many. this one should have never been resurrected. long, long over-descriptive scenes, poor writing and that's just the first page ;-). i don't usually write reviews because i'm a pretty simple girl-i liked it, it didnt do it for me, i LOVED it! one word sums up dow mossman's (give credit where credit's due) stones of summer...ugh!
September 1, 2019
The world of publishing is littered with so-called "lost masterpieces", books that were either highly regarded when they first came out but faded into obscurity when the author never wrote a follow up or died too young, or were distributed so poorly before they went out of print that not that many people were able to read them before they vanished into the ether. Needless to say they often made a big impression on the few readers they did have or else people wouldn't have kept the memory alive, sharing copies with friends, scouring used bookstores for something they once remembered fondly or in the case of Mark Moskowitz, going out on a long quest for the author and filming his search (along with the results).
That documentary was "Stone Reader". Released in 2002, it chronicled Moskowitz's quest to figure out whatever happened to author Dow Mossman and bring the book back into the wider conversation. I've never or even heard of the documentary (beyond it being mentioned on the backcover) so don't ask me why I even have this book except perhaps I bought it when it was republished, its six hundred page girth catching my eye as big books so often do. But I've heard the documentary's good so maybe at some point I'll get around to watching it.
Before the advent of the Internet making buying everything easy from everywhere, legally or otherwise, if a semi-obscure fell out of print and you wanted to read it chances are you were in for a hunt. If you were lucky you had several used book stores with decent turnover and a good depth of stock to sift through but if not you were in for some fun. I personally searched for 1970s Robert Silverberg novels throughout my college years and my Holy Grail was the middle volume of Brian Aldiss' Helliconia Trilogy after finding the other two in a bargain book section at a large chain bookstore (that one after several years eventually required the assistance of the Internet). As anyone who's ever collected comics will tell you, sometimes the thrill is in the search. Now unless a book is rare its fairly easy to find a copy of just about anything with a little electronic sleuthing and "forgotten" books are being brought back all the time.
The question of course is whether some books are built up so much in our memories that their reemergence can't help but be a little deflating. Sometimes our reactions to books are enhanced by an intersection with both the time we live in and the time of our life when we first encounter it, and are so specific to that time that just shoving a certain book at someone else and eagerly awaiting their astounded reaction may be somewhat futile. Like some of those thought lost episodes of "Doctor Who" some things are better when revisited in the hazy aura of golden memories.
Its tempting to go into this book with a healthy bit of skepticism. A contemporary review of the book described it as "a holy book . . . burn[ing] with a sacred Byzantine fire" and while the latter part in these over the top times could be someone's description of their latest frozen yogurt find there's quite a few quotes on the back in the same vein (including one from Joseph McElroy (!), no stranger to books that could be described as "byzantine" for a different reason), almost setting the curious reader up for failure because you have to imagine nothing can quite equal whatever experience these people had mainlining this book (plus I think sometimes you can accuse critics of really liking obscure things in direct proportion to how obscure they are).
Said curious reader will quickly discover its not a book for the casual reader. Positioned as a coming of age tale of a boy growing into a young man in the Vietnam War era of the sixties, very little will prepare you for the actual presentation. Structured in three parts to dip us into the story of Dawes William as a lad, a teenager and a man in his twenties, Mossman decides to ask us politely to stand in front of the fire hydrant before he knocks it open with a giant wrench and treats us to the full pressure wash of his stream of consciousness. If it were possible to literally drown someone in imagery you would have rescue helicopters scouring the waters for you after about ten pages, so richly dense is the prose.
But my goodness is he good at it, especially in the first section. Given the size of the book and the fact that it’s a debut novel you'd expect it to be turgid and overwritten but somehow he manages to make it sing, drenching the pages in visions of widespread vistas and enough sunlight fractured through swaying grasses to make Terrence Malick shed a single tear of approval. The density of it takes some getting used to but what's remarkable for me is how it rarely feels strained. Normally debut novels can be clunky affairs, possessed of the untamed fire of youth but not yet acquiring the skills to fully articulate what you're trying to do. For most of the book Mossman is the best of both worlds, managing to perfectly capture what pictures he's trying to paint but retaining the exuberant burst of someone finally expressing the story he's always wanted to tell. It’s a frightening assurance, the literary equivalent of someone dancing on a high wire, doing backflips and whooping about how wonderful it is. Its just a burst that never stops.
For a lot of people the first section might be the best, chronicling Dawes' yearly visit with his parents to his grandparents' farm, where his grandfather's racing greyhound business in his decline. It feels shot through with the vision of a child and if any sequence is going to make you suspicious that its vaguely autobiographical, its probably here as all of it feels lived in, the old family routines, the hinted at histories, the casual cruelties between generations, the slowly crumbling eccentric lady who lives nearby, the crackly church masses heard through the radio. It has a mythic feel that's oddly personal, a story we tell ourselves to explain the gap between how it was and how we wanted it to be.
It will also be quickly obvious that its going to be one of those stories where you're more along for the ride than wondering where its eventually going to take you. Mossman's deft enough with the prose that the sentences never bog down but other than "Dawes is a quirky boy" being the overriding takeaway you're coasting along on pure feeling.
This becomes more pronounced in the second sequence, where Dawes is now eighteen and spends his last summer before college hanging around with his friends, having girlfriends and getting up to all kinds of antics. There's a little more drift here, even as Mossman is good at capturing not only the era but the era seen through a teenager's eyes (who isn't aware that he's part of an "era") but if you were hoping that the first section was setting you up for some plot progression you're not getting much beyond the passage of time, that same aimlessness that "American Graffiti" and "Dazed and Confused" captured, only you're not watching for the glimpses of famous people when they were young.
Yet lest you think its all impressionistic scenes, it becomes clear that when something needs to happen he can make it happen. He manages this trick at least once in each section with a spat between Dawes and his grandfather spiralling out of control with a sickening loss of balance and then later in the teenage years he unspools a incident so jarringly terrifying that it left me utterly cold, wrapped in a tightening net woven with razorwire. Its awful and yet I found myself reading it agonizingly slowly, almost one word at a time, as if I could somehow stop it from happening. Maybe I'm just in a vulnerable place being unemployed and thus more susceptible to reminders that we're in a random universe bereft of order or sense but that sequence hit me hard, made worse by its slow motion unfurling.
From there things go all out of order in the final section as an older and much loopier Dawes lives in Mexico, hanging out with a girlfriend, reading letters from a friend who went to Vietnam and recalling sequences from a book he's written or is trying to write. If any part of this book is going to try anyone's patience its here, as what remains of the plot becomes completely fragmented, sometimes pages from Dawes' book overtaking what remains of any forward motion. Its ambitious and I'm not sure completely works, reflecting someone's crumbling mental state but also showing the downsides of someone with actively untreated mental illness trying to tell you a story. When it pulls itself into focus (a conversation with his parents, a confrontational chat at a bar, the Vietnam letters) its startingly effective but the fraying that lurks at the edges intrudes on the story enough that it makes you wonder if he's trying to do too much at once, trying to mirror the sensitive Dawes' slow breakdown over the course of his life with the country gradually shaking itself apart.
But as much as the story is of its time it could also happen at any time. Beyond the references to Vietnam (which would be pretty much impossible to ignore for any book set in the US in the sixties) all the dates could be stripped away and it would still retain a sense of time and place. If there's a plot here it’s the story of someone pushing hard against a world while fully aware that his efforts are grinding him down. Dawes, for better or worse, is out of step with nearly everything but the alternative of being subsumed into his own time is something he can't abide. He could let his name dissolve into a faceless mud with all the others that merely existed but he can't and that's where the cost comes in. Mossman's telling a story from a vantage so personal that the obvious question of is it worth it never comes to mind. The answer is always yes, even when there's more blood outside than inside.
Mossman didn't write a perfect novel but there are times when its better to release something imperfect than to never let it go at all, especially when the result is a book only he could have written. He's there in the mess, in the clean lines and the scratches, where it soars and stumbles. The novel sometimes strains so hard to fit it all in that you wonder if he had anything left when it was done.
I don't know if he did. By all reports after the book was published he worked as a welder and a newspaper bundler. The documentary apparently shows him working on some books, though seventeen years after its release nothing has emerged. Maybe he'll write again. I hope he does, if he wants to. Maybe the royalties from the re-release of the novel are enough to let him live how he wants. I hope that's true, too. It hardly matters. What's important is that he was able to channel what he was feeling and hoping and imagining and turn it into something physical that he could share, him with us and us with each other. And whether it’s the greatest book you've never read or just a giant doorstop maybe the better question isn't why didn't he write more but why so many of us haven't.
That documentary was "Stone Reader". Released in 2002, it chronicled Moskowitz's quest to figure out whatever happened to author Dow Mossman and bring the book back into the wider conversation. I've never or even heard of the documentary (beyond it being mentioned on the backcover) so don't ask me why I even have this book except perhaps I bought it when it was republished, its six hundred page girth catching my eye as big books so often do. But I've heard the documentary's good so maybe at some point I'll get around to watching it.
Before the advent of the Internet making buying everything easy from everywhere, legally or otherwise, if a semi-obscure fell out of print and you wanted to read it chances are you were in for a hunt. If you were lucky you had several used book stores with decent turnover and a good depth of stock to sift through but if not you were in for some fun. I personally searched for 1970s Robert Silverberg novels throughout my college years and my Holy Grail was the middle volume of Brian Aldiss' Helliconia Trilogy after finding the other two in a bargain book section at a large chain bookstore (that one after several years eventually required the assistance of the Internet). As anyone who's ever collected comics will tell you, sometimes the thrill is in the search. Now unless a book is rare its fairly easy to find a copy of just about anything with a little electronic sleuthing and "forgotten" books are being brought back all the time.
The question of course is whether some books are built up so much in our memories that their reemergence can't help but be a little deflating. Sometimes our reactions to books are enhanced by an intersection with both the time we live in and the time of our life when we first encounter it, and are so specific to that time that just shoving a certain book at someone else and eagerly awaiting their astounded reaction may be somewhat futile. Like some of those thought lost episodes of "Doctor Who" some things are better when revisited in the hazy aura of golden memories.
Its tempting to go into this book with a healthy bit of skepticism. A contemporary review of the book described it as "a holy book . . . burn[ing] with a sacred Byzantine fire" and while the latter part in these over the top times could be someone's description of their latest frozen yogurt find there's quite a few quotes on the back in the same vein (including one from Joseph McElroy (!), no stranger to books that could be described as "byzantine" for a different reason), almost setting the curious reader up for failure because you have to imagine nothing can quite equal whatever experience these people had mainlining this book (plus I think sometimes you can accuse critics of really liking obscure things in direct proportion to how obscure they are).
Said curious reader will quickly discover its not a book for the casual reader. Positioned as a coming of age tale of a boy growing into a young man in the Vietnam War era of the sixties, very little will prepare you for the actual presentation. Structured in three parts to dip us into the story of Dawes William as a lad, a teenager and a man in his twenties, Mossman decides to ask us politely to stand in front of the fire hydrant before he knocks it open with a giant wrench and treats us to the full pressure wash of his stream of consciousness. If it were possible to literally drown someone in imagery you would have rescue helicopters scouring the waters for you after about ten pages, so richly dense is the prose.
But my goodness is he good at it, especially in the first section. Given the size of the book and the fact that it’s a debut novel you'd expect it to be turgid and overwritten but somehow he manages to make it sing, drenching the pages in visions of widespread vistas and enough sunlight fractured through swaying grasses to make Terrence Malick shed a single tear of approval. The density of it takes some getting used to but what's remarkable for me is how it rarely feels strained. Normally debut novels can be clunky affairs, possessed of the untamed fire of youth but not yet acquiring the skills to fully articulate what you're trying to do. For most of the book Mossman is the best of both worlds, managing to perfectly capture what pictures he's trying to paint but retaining the exuberant burst of someone finally expressing the story he's always wanted to tell. It’s a frightening assurance, the literary equivalent of someone dancing on a high wire, doing backflips and whooping about how wonderful it is. Its just a burst that never stops.
For a lot of people the first section might be the best, chronicling Dawes' yearly visit with his parents to his grandparents' farm, where his grandfather's racing greyhound business in his decline. It feels shot through with the vision of a child and if any sequence is going to make you suspicious that its vaguely autobiographical, its probably here as all of it feels lived in, the old family routines, the hinted at histories, the casual cruelties between generations, the slowly crumbling eccentric lady who lives nearby, the crackly church masses heard through the radio. It has a mythic feel that's oddly personal, a story we tell ourselves to explain the gap between how it was and how we wanted it to be.
It will also be quickly obvious that its going to be one of those stories where you're more along for the ride than wondering where its eventually going to take you. Mossman's deft enough with the prose that the sentences never bog down but other than "Dawes is a quirky boy" being the overriding takeaway you're coasting along on pure feeling.
This becomes more pronounced in the second sequence, where Dawes is now eighteen and spends his last summer before college hanging around with his friends, having girlfriends and getting up to all kinds of antics. There's a little more drift here, even as Mossman is good at capturing not only the era but the era seen through a teenager's eyes (who isn't aware that he's part of an "era") but if you were hoping that the first section was setting you up for some plot progression you're not getting much beyond the passage of time, that same aimlessness that "American Graffiti" and "Dazed and Confused" captured, only you're not watching for the glimpses of famous people when they were young.
Yet lest you think its all impressionistic scenes, it becomes clear that when something needs to happen he can make it happen. He manages this trick at least once in each section with a spat between Dawes and his grandfather spiralling out of control with a sickening loss of balance and then later in the teenage years he unspools a incident so jarringly terrifying that it left me utterly cold, wrapped in a tightening net woven with razorwire. Its awful and yet I found myself reading it agonizingly slowly, almost one word at a time, as if I could somehow stop it from happening. Maybe I'm just in a vulnerable place being unemployed and thus more susceptible to reminders that we're in a random universe bereft of order or sense but that sequence hit me hard, made worse by its slow motion unfurling.
From there things go all out of order in the final section as an older and much loopier Dawes lives in Mexico, hanging out with a girlfriend, reading letters from a friend who went to Vietnam and recalling sequences from a book he's written or is trying to write. If any part of this book is going to try anyone's patience its here, as what remains of the plot becomes completely fragmented, sometimes pages from Dawes' book overtaking what remains of any forward motion. Its ambitious and I'm not sure completely works, reflecting someone's crumbling mental state but also showing the downsides of someone with actively untreated mental illness trying to tell you a story. When it pulls itself into focus (a conversation with his parents, a confrontational chat at a bar, the Vietnam letters) its startingly effective but the fraying that lurks at the edges intrudes on the story enough that it makes you wonder if he's trying to do too much at once, trying to mirror the sensitive Dawes' slow breakdown over the course of his life with the country gradually shaking itself apart.
But as much as the story is of its time it could also happen at any time. Beyond the references to Vietnam (which would be pretty much impossible to ignore for any book set in the US in the sixties) all the dates could be stripped away and it would still retain a sense of time and place. If there's a plot here it’s the story of someone pushing hard against a world while fully aware that his efforts are grinding him down. Dawes, for better or worse, is out of step with nearly everything but the alternative of being subsumed into his own time is something he can't abide. He could let his name dissolve into a faceless mud with all the others that merely existed but he can't and that's where the cost comes in. Mossman's telling a story from a vantage so personal that the obvious question of is it worth it never comes to mind. The answer is always yes, even when there's more blood outside than inside.
Mossman didn't write a perfect novel but there are times when its better to release something imperfect than to never let it go at all, especially when the result is a book only he could have written. He's there in the mess, in the clean lines and the scratches, where it soars and stumbles. The novel sometimes strains so hard to fit it all in that you wonder if he had anything left when it was done.
I don't know if he did. By all reports after the book was published he worked as a welder and a newspaper bundler. The documentary apparently shows him working on some books, though seventeen years after its release nothing has emerged. Maybe he'll write again. I hope he does, if he wants to. Maybe the royalties from the re-release of the novel are enough to let him live how he wants. I hope that's true, too. It hardly matters. What's important is that he was able to channel what he was feeling and hoping and imagining and turn it into something physical that he could share, him with us and us with each other. And whether it’s the greatest book you've never read or just a giant doorstop maybe the better question isn't why didn't he write more but why so many of us haven't.
Read
February 9, 2015I couldn’t do it. Perhaps I didn’t give this book enough of a chance since I only read one chapter before calling it quits. This book was published first in 1972 to critical acclaim but then went out of print and its author simply faded away. But in 2002, a documentary called Stone Reader made some splash. In it, Mark Moskowitz records his journey to track down the author of this book that he has always loved but that no one else seems to have heard of. He finds the author working as a welder in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Because of the documentary, the book was republished in 2003. Interested yet? At the time of the book’s first publication, Mossman was compared to the likes of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Philip Roth and others. Ok, so I’m all in now.
But then I actually started reading the book.
The only similarities I could see between this book and Faulkner and Roth were perhaps the long-winded, whirlwind-like paragraphs of volcanic ramble. But in the case of Roth and Faulkner, the elongated segments always seemed to be rushing to something complete and whole at the end of it. I was biting into something worthwhile even though it took awhile to chew. The writing always flowed with these authors. I didn’t notice the length of certain scenes or paragraphs because the writing moved me along easily.
But with Mossman, I constantly found myself staring at the page, seeing the words instead of hearing the story. His use of metaphors was particularly disruptive to the flow. (What does “thick as a dream of falling timbers” mean? What about: “Dark ghosts of flesh” or “the eyes like sheep sleeping in a field of darkened teeth.”) He used mixed metaphors which diminished the strength of the comparison. (Books were cloistered nests of bird and well-kept tombstones in the same sentence) The metaphors were too thick in general and the dialogue disorienting. The subject matter also troubled me: the odyssey of a eccentric and turbulent boy. No one seemed to know the point of the story.
I wasn’t patient enough to read 581 pages to find the brilliance.
But then I actually started reading the book.
The only similarities I could see between this book and Faulkner and Roth were perhaps the long-winded, whirlwind-like paragraphs of volcanic ramble. But in the case of Roth and Faulkner, the elongated segments always seemed to be rushing to something complete and whole at the end of it. I was biting into something worthwhile even though it took awhile to chew. The writing always flowed with these authors. I didn’t notice the length of certain scenes or paragraphs because the writing moved me along easily.
But with Mossman, I constantly found myself staring at the page, seeing the words instead of hearing the story. His use of metaphors was particularly disruptive to the flow. (What does “thick as a dream of falling timbers” mean? What about: “Dark ghosts of flesh” or “the eyes like sheep sleeping in a field of darkened teeth.”) He used mixed metaphors which diminished the strength of the comparison. (Books were cloistered nests of bird and well-kept tombstones in the same sentence) The metaphors were too thick in general and the dialogue disorienting. The subject matter also troubled me: the odyssey of a eccentric and turbulent boy. No one seemed to know the point of the story.
I wasn’t patient enough to read 581 pages to find the brilliance.
did-not-finish
December 3, 2021DNF - page 53 (9%)
Every couple of months, I'll have the following conversation with my grandmother:
"Have you read [historical fiction/literary fiction/biography of a person I'm not interested in] book? I want to talk to you about it!"
"No, Grandma, I mostly read [sci-fi/fantasy/alt-history/horror] books."
And she'll shake her head and sigh disappointedly in my lack of culture.
She means well, lol, but we have very, very different tastes in books. If I remember correctly, this was another volume she gifted me, just before I started college - in Iowa (Same as the setting for this novel).
This book is slice of life, a genre I don't particularly enjoy, and boy is this a dense one. Not only in printing - my copy has tall and very full pages with quite small print - the stylistic writing made even the short amount I read quite a slog. A good 2/3 of the first chapter was a flashback with the main character, in difficult to read italics. There's also a fair amount of dialectically stylized writing, another literary element I tend to avoid.
All in all, this book is definitely not for me. And I did know that coming in. But if there's one thing I like even less than DNF'ing a book, it's selling it to Half Price Books when I haven't even at least tried to read it.
Every couple of months, I'll have the following conversation with my grandmother:
"Have you read [historical fiction/literary fiction/biography of a person I'm not interested in] book? I want to talk to you about it!"
"No, Grandma, I mostly read [sci-fi/fantasy/alt-history/horror] books."
And she'll shake her head and sigh disappointedly in my lack of culture.
She means well, lol, but we have very, very different tastes in books. If I remember correctly, this was another volume she gifted me, just before I started college - in Iowa (Same as the setting for this novel).
This book is slice of life, a genre I don't particularly enjoy, and boy is this a dense one. Not only in printing - my copy has tall and very full pages with quite small print - the stylistic writing made even the short amount I read quite a slog. A good 2/3 of the first chapter was a flashback with the main character, in difficult to read italics. There's also a fair amount of dialectically stylized writing, another literary element I tend to avoid.
All in all, this book is definitely not for me. And I did know that coming in. But if there's one thing I like even less than DNF'ing a book, it's selling it to Half Price Books when I haven't even at least tried to read it.
June 14, 2011
I'll keep it short, because most everything has already been said. The book absolutely dominated my attention for a week or two. The alienated Midwest upbringing, the almost violent rebellions (usually for no real reason)-- it all rang perfectly true. That's the first half of the novel. It has the kind of close focus of books by Kerouac and Henry Miller.
At about the halfway point, Dow's person saga intrudes on the book his real-life descent into madness. Via the book, I felt each dip and swerve as Dow Mossman's life unraveled. This is the only chronicle of schizophrenia worth reading that I'm aware of. It's an amazing ride, and because the book is a coming-of-age book, this is one man's story. Novel? Memoir? Yes to both.
Why 4-star instead of 5-star on the review? Because I longed for some kind of closure -- I wish I could re the book he SET OUT TO WRITE before the voices in his head became too loud to ignore.
Reommended for those who are patient readers. Most of us have spent some time with the severely mentally ill. Such a conversation requires patience. Imagine reading a thick book set in the heart of delusion.
At about the halfway point, Dow's person saga intrudes on the book his real-life descent into madness. Via the book, I felt each dip and swerve as Dow Mossman's life unraveled. This is the only chronicle of schizophrenia worth reading that I'm aware of. It's an amazing ride, and because the book is a coming-of-age book, this is one man's story. Novel? Memoir? Yes to both.
Why 4-star instead of 5-star on the review? Because I longed for some kind of closure -- I wish I could re the book he SET OUT TO WRITE before the voices in his head became too loud to ignore.
Reommended for those who are patient readers. Most of us have spent some time with the severely mentally ill. Such a conversation requires patience. Imagine reading a thick book set in the heart of delusion.
November 23, 2007
Originally published in 1972, The Stones of Summer, despite favorable reviews and a cult following, went out of print for nearly 20 years. Following Mark Moskowitz's 2003 documentary film Stone Reader (about Mossman and The Stones of Summer), the book's popularity has undergone a much-deserved resurgence. Dow Mossman, an Iowa Writer's Workshop graduate, suffered a mental breakdown while completing the book, and slipped into relative obscurity following its publication (the only title Mossman was to publish).
A coming-of-age tale spanning nineteen years in the life of Dawes Williams, Stones' remarkable breadth and "hallucinatory prose" portray the optimism and angst of a generation now past. Divided into three stylistically unique parts, the epic novel follows Dawes's mischievous childhood on an Iowa farm, through his tumultuous teenage years, and finally into the frustrated literary ambitions of his troubled adulthood. Touching yet tragic, The Stones of Summer is a quintessential work of American literature. "...Atttssss Dawes!"
A coming-of-age tale spanning nineteen years in the life of Dawes Williams, Stones' remarkable breadth and "hallucinatory prose" portray the optimism and angst of a generation now past. Divided into three stylistically unique parts, the epic novel follows Dawes's mischievous childhood on an Iowa farm, through his tumultuous teenage years, and finally into the frustrated literary ambitions of his troubled adulthood. Touching yet tragic, The Stones of Summer is a quintessential work of American literature. "...Atttssss Dawes!"
July 12, 2022
Solid 4.5 ⭐️
I’m sure by now you know the story. Documentary made (which is excellent) of the long forgotten/first time novel The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman. A really well written 50’s/60’s coming of age novel. Beautiful in its capturing of that time. And one of the best examples of writing a young adult who happens to be smart in his way but never unbelievable. One of the better first novels I’ve ever read. The filmmaker was right. Sad, sad that he never wrote another.
See the movie (Stone Reader). Read the book. That’s all.
I’m sure by now you know the story. Documentary made (which is excellent) of the long forgotten/first time novel The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman. A really well written 50’s/60’s coming of age novel. Beautiful in its capturing of that time. And one of the best examples of writing a young adult who happens to be smart in his way but never unbelievable. One of the better first novels I’ve ever read. The filmmaker was right. Sad, sad that he never wrote another.
See the movie (Stone Reader). Read the book. That’s all.
July 10, 2020
I would give this less than one star if I could. This is without a doubt the worst book I have ever read in my 70 years, and should be nominated for worst book ever written. 581 pages of nonsensical language. I would only recommend it for people on death row because it would make the time they have left seem much longer.
September 10, 2013
Evidently, this book has received extraordinary hype; of which, I knew nothing about at the time of its purchase in 2003 - I just happened to think that the cover was pretty. Based on reviews, it seems the documentary, The Stone Reader, led many to read, or in the very least partially read, this very weighty novel. Fortunately, for me, it has had the opposite effect; The Stones of Summer had made me desperate to see the documentary. If nothing else, I would like to be introduced to the author who created such f'ed up prose.
It has taken me a long time to muddle through this text. Perhaps it has taken so long to get through this tome, not because I, at times, hated this novel with a fierce loathing I reserve for pedophiles; or not because at the time I began reading my second daughter was still under a year-old and being a husband, a father and an employee are priorities; but more so because it is meant for slow digestion over a long period of time.
Startling tough, is how I would describe this book. There are times I wanted to give up, much like I did with the books I was forced to read as a high school student (forgive me my trespasses The Grapes of Wrath). But, alas, I gave up that notion long ago. I have a friend that believe that “life is too short” to read that which you don’t necessarily enjoy. This belief is apparently held by many of the reviewers out there. I say horseshit. Life is only “too” short when you give up and live in the experience. Believe me; this book has most certainly prolonged my life. I often found myself reading and rereading a paragraph over a few minutes – it felt like an eternity.
This novel (autobiography?) is so weighed down by descriptive metaphors and similes, that the prose is muddied. However, its greatest weakness is, at times, its greatest strength. Some of the writing is so florid that the images evoke those scenes within the mind’s eye. The Stones of Summer really is beautifully written, if not overwrought. I imagine both the editor and author stoned, nay tripping, as they read through the final draft. Although I maintain a “just say no” belief, I firmly believe a good hit of acid would truly lead you down its rabbit hole.
The Stones is broken into three acts – Dawes Williams as a precocious child, a rebellious teenager and finally has a drug fueled twenty-something. Unlike many of the reviewers, who ranks start to finish respectively from best to worse, I happened to have enjoyed the second act the most.
The second 3rd, by far, is the most narrative and easiest for my simpleton brain to comprehend. His rebellious and self-titled “bad boy” teenage years were filled with vignettes from these times ultimately ending in tragedy. There more memorable moments (more precisely, the reason I have given the book three out of five stars instead of two) were when he was trying to build the perfect sentence and toward the end when pointed to his fellow friends that they were not really bad – if they were, they’d be mugging old ladies’ pocket books.
The third 3rd of the book, which most seem to hate, round out the whole story for me. It is out of keeping with the natural order of time. However, the back and forth nature between him and his other personality bring clarification to where he is now and how he arrived. At points, the writing is paranoid and nonsensical. But, then so is the character (and as I’ve come to learn in my post-read research, the author.) Ultimately, the end is fitting for the character. Don’t get me wrong, this is not glowing praise, it just fits. There were points when I had to skim over paragraph, because the writing was just so… so… out there? Just weird. Again, I point to LSD.
And finally, the first 3rd, of the book was the least satisfying. It is probably the least satisfying due to my limited mental faculties. However, it did illuminate the character and how Dawes came to his end. I did not grasp much of the concepts, but to my understanding it shows much what it was like to come of age in that era. Maybe… WWII vet, depression bred father all culminating into this baby boomer. Perhaps, although a stretch, it give some incite, into this “me first” generation that led to the 80’s. Like I said, I’m stretching really, really far out there.
Ultimately, I draw comparisons to Kerouac, who I really dislike. That being said, while I like Mossman’s book more than On the Road, I think that he could have used Jack’s more minimalist prose. I would have enjoyed it. The writing is poetic and paints a canvas of pictures. However, it is so muddied it is more of a Pollack. I wouldn’t recommend this novel to anyone. However, I am happy to have completed this massive tome. I’ve learned, seen some pretty imagery and therefore I have lived that much longer. Also, it really makes me want to create that perfect sentence.
It has taken me a long time to muddle through this text. Perhaps it has taken so long to get through this tome, not because I, at times, hated this novel with a fierce loathing I reserve for pedophiles; or not because at the time I began reading my second daughter was still under a year-old and being a husband, a father and an employee are priorities; but more so because it is meant for slow digestion over a long period of time.
Startling tough, is how I would describe this book. There are times I wanted to give up, much like I did with the books I was forced to read as a high school student (forgive me my trespasses The Grapes of Wrath). But, alas, I gave up that notion long ago. I have a friend that believe that “life is too short” to read that which you don’t necessarily enjoy. This belief is apparently held by many of the reviewers out there. I say horseshit. Life is only “too” short when you give up and live in the experience. Believe me; this book has most certainly prolonged my life. I often found myself reading and rereading a paragraph over a few minutes – it felt like an eternity.
This novel (autobiography?) is so weighed down by descriptive metaphors and similes, that the prose is muddied. However, its greatest weakness is, at times, its greatest strength. Some of the writing is so florid that the images evoke those scenes within the mind’s eye. The Stones of Summer really is beautifully written, if not overwrought. I imagine both the editor and author stoned, nay tripping, as they read through the final draft. Although I maintain a “just say no” belief, I firmly believe a good hit of acid would truly lead you down its rabbit hole.
The Stones is broken into three acts – Dawes Williams as a precocious child, a rebellious teenager and finally has a drug fueled twenty-something. Unlike many of the reviewers, who ranks start to finish respectively from best to worse, I happened to have enjoyed the second act the most.
The second 3rd, by far, is the most narrative and easiest for my simpleton brain to comprehend. His rebellious and self-titled “bad boy” teenage years were filled with vignettes from these times ultimately ending in tragedy. There more memorable moments (more precisely, the reason I have given the book three out of five stars instead of two) were when he was trying to build the perfect sentence and toward the end when pointed to his fellow friends that they were not really bad – if they were, they’d be mugging old ladies’ pocket books.
The third 3rd of the book, which most seem to hate, round out the whole story for me. It is out of keeping with the natural order of time. However, the back and forth nature between him and his other personality bring clarification to where he is now and how he arrived. At points, the writing is paranoid and nonsensical. But, then so is the character (and as I’ve come to learn in my post-read research, the author.) Ultimately, the end is fitting for the character. Don’t get me wrong, this is not glowing praise, it just fits. There were points when I had to skim over paragraph, because the writing was just so… so… out there? Just weird. Again, I point to LSD.
And finally, the first 3rd, of the book was the least satisfying. It is probably the least satisfying due to my limited mental faculties. However, it did illuminate the character and how Dawes came to his end. I did not grasp much of the concepts, but to my understanding it shows much what it was like to come of age in that era. Maybe… WWII vet, depression bred father all culminating into this baby boomer. Perhaps, although a stretch, it give some incite, into this “me first” generation that led to the 80’s. Like I said, I’m stretching really, really far out there.
Ultimately, I draw comparisons to Kerouac, who I really dislike. That being said, while I like Mossman’s book more than On the Road, I think that he could have used Jack’s more minimalist prose. I would have enjoyed it. The writing is poetic and paints a canvas of pictures. However, it is so muddied it is more of a Pollack. I wouldn’t recommend this novel to anyone. However, I am happy to have completed this massive tome. I’ve learned, seen some pretty imagery and therefore I have lived that much longer. Also, it really makes me want to create that perfect sentence.
April 26, 2018
Probably like most people: I found my way to this book through the doc ‘The Stone Reader’ from 2002 – and it was an amazing and inspiring little film.
I immediately went out and bought this book, positive I was going to devour it and love it. But around the 120 page mark I waved the white flag and just hid it away so I could completely forget about it.
Over a decade later and I stumbled upon it again… the pages now yellowed and the coupon I was using as a bookmark having expired back in 2005.
I’m older (definitely) and wiser (debatable) – I should tackle it anew. And no matter what – I’m finishing it this time around.
Divided into three ‘books’ – which each section I read it felt like a victory and that finish line was right there on the horizon. Little did I know that ‘Book III’ was going to devolve to the point of absurdity… the font gets smaller (?!) as the obnoxious main character reads from his own (horrendous) journal entries and (imagined?) letters from important people in his past. Some pages I would re-read at least three times trying to get a grasp of what the hell is going on but I think the author was just a little too proud of himself and his editor never had the backbone to tell him it’s awful and pretentious and nowhere near as clever and as insightful as he thought it was.
Yes – there’s a lot of wonderful moments and poetry and laugh-out-loud segments scattered throughout the almost 600 pages. If I were pitching this as a possible movie I’d say, “Think Glass Menagerie meets Good Will Hunting meets Look Homeward, Angel meets Stand By Me. Think 'A Catcher in the Rye' written by Hunter S. Thompson without the help of a competent editor. I see a very young DiCaprio or Timothée Chalamet in the lead role. But the audience will never like him. ” (Then the poor sap assigned to adapt the book into a screenplay would most definitely want to murder me when he realizes how much I oversold the book during the meeting.)
One of my oldest and dearest friends gave this 5-stars and now I'm seriously questioning our friendship.
"'What I want you to do is just promise me not to believe anything anybody tells ya as long as you live.'"
"[B]ut he could see that words were only vessels for defining place, not time, because time had no vessels for defining itself, even in shadows, the way water forms itself in a jar."
“’Good men are scarc’r ‘an good animals…’”
“Like two childhood friends who had pressed bloody thumbs, or sworn to never part, or at least to meet on the same spot, with the same thought, twenty years later, but who knew, also without words, that they would do neither, they sat passing near-whispers between them, like telegrams before they were needed, like valentines with bloodied hearts.”
"'What do I have to do-be my own Tom Sawyer, my own dreamer, forchristsake?'"
“They walked along alone together. Walt Disney himself smiled after in the heavens, with unbelievably pearly teeth, with red dancing angels and green flying fairies, with hair as slick as a riverboat gambler’s, with a deific head bigger than all the oil money in Texas…”
"I didn't make this world. I didn't even make myself."
“’You gamble… for the exact same reason people without fireplaces go out into the woods to chop firewood.’”
I immediately went out and bought this book, positive I was going to devour it and love it. But around the 120 page mark I waved the white flag and just hid it away so I could completely forget about it.
Over a decade later and I stumbled upon it again… the pages now yellowed and the coupon I was using as a bookmark having expired back in 2005.
I’m older (definitely) and wiser (debatable) – I should tackle it anew. And no matter what – I’m finishing it this time around.
Divided into three ‘books’ – which each section I read it felt like a victory and that finish line was right there on the horizon. Little did I know that ‘Book III’ was going to devolve to the point of absurdity… the font gets smaller (?!) as the obnoxious main character reads from his own (horrendous) journal entries and (imagined?) letters from important people in his past. Some pages I would re-read at least three times trying to get a grasp of what the hell is going on but I think the author was just a little too proud of himself and his editor never had the backbone to tell him it’s awful and pretentious and nowhere near as clever and as insightful as he thought it was.
Yes – there’s a lot of wonderful moments and poetry and laugh-out-loud segments scattered throughout the almost 600 pages. If I were pitching this as a possible movie I’d say, “Think Glass Menagerie meets Good Will Hunting meets Look Homeward, Angel meets Stand By Me. Think 'A Catcher in the Rye' written by Hunter S. Thompson without the help of a competent editor. I see a very young DiCaprio or Timothée Chalamet in the lead role. But the audience will never like him. ” (Then the poor sap assigned to adapt the book into a screenplay would most definitely want to murder me when he realizes how much I oversold the book during the meeting.)
One of my oldest and dearest friends gave this 5-stars and now I'm seriously questioning our friendship.
"'What I want you to do is just promise me not to believe anything anybody tells ya as long as you live.'"
"[B]ut he could see that words were only vessels for defining place, not time, because time had no vessels for defining itself, even in shadows, the way water forms itself in a jar."
“’Good men are scarc’r ‘an good animals…’”
“Like two childhood friends who had pressed bloody thumbs, or sworn to never part, or at least to meet on the same spot, with the same thought, twenty years later, but who knew, also without words, that they would do neither, they sat passing near-whispers between them, like telegrams before they were needed, like valentines with bloodied hearts.”
"'What do I have to do-be my own Tom Sawyer, my own dreamer, forchristsake?'"
“They walked along alone together. Walt Disney himself smiled after in the heavens, with unbelievably pearly teeth, with red dancing angels and green flying fairies, with hair as slick as a riverboat gambler’s, with a deific head bigger than all the oil money in Texas…”
"I didn't make this world. I didn't even make myself."
“’You gamble… for the exact same reason people without fireplaces go out into the woods to chop firewood.’”
Read
April 20, 2023Somewhere late in The Stones of Summer, during one of Dawes Williams's most severe plunges into mania, the narrator observes:
"... he had perhaps stolen it [a copy of War And Peace] for its pretentious length, but which, soon, involved him as he had never been involved before; involved him, for the first time, in ways his own life never had."
Shortly afterwards, Dawes tries to read a copy of Pride And Prejudice on the bank of a river in Oaxaca, but he finds it incomprehensible—he struggles to process the symmetry of Austen’s plots, characters, and dialogue, and he ends up throwing the book into the water. Dow Mossman had to have been aware that there would be readers of the exact opposite constitution who would do the same with his book. The Stones Of Summer is a beautiful, totally unique novel, but its one whose form comes into focus only gradually, after being viewed through the kaleidoscopic rearview mirror of its final section. Joseph McElroy has called it “true American surrealism”, and it’s hard to argue with that: while the middle section of the book is very funny, and almost picaresque in its depiction of midwestern adolescent sexuality, its imagery later becomes inverted and refracted, reflecting Dawes’s inner turbulence as he tries to bury his trauma in novels and notebooks.
As a stylist, Mossman is interested in the experience of time and history, often using surprising sentence structures to capture the simulteneity of experience:
"Fall came, Iowa changed, became a dead vine, a cold stalk, broken close to the yellow patches of earth, the hard blue edge of invisible wood smoke and sky.” (p. 238)
or,
"The air was soft, full of curtains of dung, warm udders, the undersides of cows, and it was August again."
Like Faulkner, Mossman writes as if the past is not even past, each sentence calling back and forth, and building its own world. Its coming-of-age narrative is fairly straightforward in itself, and occasionally even feels trite (particularly during the middle section), but it can never be separated from the telling. Over the course of its three books, the style shifts drastically, from the pastoral modernism of its opening section to its fragmentary ending (which, to me, was closer to Malcolm Lowry than Gaddis or Faulkner). Its amazing that Mossman emerged with a novel this accomplished and then disappeared for the rest of his (still continuing) life.
This is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and one of the best American novels I have read, period. It seems inevitable that it will be revived again—hopefully while Mossman is still alive—and will take its rightful place as a classic.
"... he had perhaps stolen it [a copy of War And Peace] for its pretentious length, but which, soon, involved him as he had never been involved before; involved him, for the first time, in ways his own life never had."
Shortly afterwards, Dawes tries to read a copy of Pride And Prejudice on the bank of a river in Oaxaca, but he finds it incomprehensible—he struggles to process the symmetry of Austen’s plots, characters, and dialogue, and he ends up throwing the book into the water. Dow Mossman had to have been aware that there would be readers of the exact opposite constitution who would do the same with his book. The Stones Of Summer is a beautiful, totally unique novel, but its one whose form comes into focus only gradually, after being viewed through the kaleidoscopic rearview mirror of its final section. Joseph McElroy has called it “true American surrealism”, and it’s hard to argue with that: while the middle section of the book is very funny, and almost picaresque in its depiction of midwestern adolescent sexuality, its imagery later becomes inverted and refracted, reflecting Dawes’s inner turbulence as he tries to bury his trauma in novels and notebooks.
As a stylist, Mossman is interested in the experience of time and history, often using surprising sentence structures to capture the simulteneity of experience:
"Fall came, Iowa changed, became a dead vine, a cold stalk, broken close to the yellow patches of earth, the hard blue edge of invisible wood smoke and sky.” (p. 238)
or,
"The air was soft, full of curtains of dung, warm udders, the undersides of cows, and it was August again."
Like Faulkner, Mossman writes as if the past is not even past, each sentence calling back and forth, and building its own world. Its coming-of-age narrative is fairly straightforward in itself, and occasionally even feels trite (particularly during the middle section), but it can never be separated from the telling. Over the course of its three books, the style shifts drastically, from the pastoral modernism of its opening section to its fragmentary ending (which, to me, was closer to Malcolm Lowry than Gaddis or Faulkner). Its amazing that Mossman emerged with a novel this accomplished and then disappeared for the rest of his (still continuing) life.
This is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and one of the best American novels I have read, period. It seems inevitable that it will be revived again—hopefully while Mossman is still alive—and will take its rightful place as a classic.
November 12, 2019
Before I start my review of this book, let me clarify the following:
1) I am not a stranger to long books; I have read such huge, detailed fiction such as Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain," or Peter Matthiessen's "Shadow Country." Also, I have read many historical series of a subject in volumes numbering from 1 up to 5.
2) I have read books with 'stream of consciousness' writing, from authors like Joyce or Faulkner.
The "Stones of Summer" is, to me, an enigma.
When I finished all 581 pages, these are my findings:
1) God Lord! Where was the editor for this book?! Besides the need to edit and reduce some of the long, rambling passages, I found there were sentences that a page or two later were repeated, the incorrect usage of words (sentences where "in" instead of "on" should have been used), and finally citing the author "Joseph Hellen" (incorrect) as opposed to the correct "Joseph Heller." Whoever author Mossman chose to have the book published was given a DIS-service by the failure of the editor to tighten up and correct this uncoordinated written book.
2) I found the main character, Dawes, to be an unempathetic character. Some reviewers cite Dawes as highly sensitive; no, Dawes is a self-centered ass. He is rude, sneaky, and thoroughly wrapped up in himself.
3) After finally reaching the end, I felt like "Okay, what was the point?" And that is the problem with this book. A "coming of age" journey for Dawes, as the 'NY Times' book reviewer cited? Not hardly. One is left with an overdone, much too long book that fails to deliver: again, what was the underlying story here, beyond the 'Dawes in three phases of his life slowly going insane'?
The backstory to this book has been Mossman struggled with this book, and certainly struggled to finish the book. Believe me, readers, it shows!
1) I am not a stranger to long books; I have read such huge, detailed fiction such as Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain," or Peter Matthiessen's "Shadow Country." Also, I have read many historical series of a subject in volumes numbering from 1 up to 5.
2) I have read books with 'stream of consciousness' writing, from authors like Joyce or Faulkner.
The "Stones of Summer" is, to me, an enigma.
When I finished all 581 pages, these are my findings:
1) God Lord! Where was the editor for this book?! Besides the need to edit and reduce some of the long, rambling passages, I found there were sentences that a page or two later were repeated, the incorrect usage of words (sentences where "in" instead of "on" should have been used), and finally citing the author "Joseph Hellen" (incorrect) as opposed to the correct "Joseph Heller." Whoever author Mossman chose to have the book published was given a DIS-service by the failure of the editor to tighten up and correct this uncoordinated written book.
2) I found the main character, Dawes, to be an unempathetic character. Some reviewers cite Dawes as highly sensitive; no, Dawes is a self-centered ass. He is rude, sneaky, and thoroughly wrapped up in himself.
3) After finally reaching the end, I felt like "Okay, what was the point?" And that is the problem with this book. A "coming of age" journey for Dawes, as the 'NY Times' book reviewer cited? Not hardly. One is left with an overdone, much too long book that fails to deliver: again, what was the underlying story here, beyond the 'Dawes in three phases of his life slowly going insane'?
The backstory to this book has been Mossman struggled with this book, and certainly struggled to finish the book. Believe me, readers, it shows!
September 7, 2008
This book is a wonderful, sink-into-a-big-chair-with-a-glass-of-iced-tea summer read. Not my first time reading this book (should have marked it read I guess) I re read this book at various phases of my own life, and so doing, pick up one more fascinating detail or imagery that makes me laugh or think, or just feel, once more what it was like to be young and directionless, clueless and not caring one whit about consequences. The very rhythm of the story lulls you back into the days when time was a very abstract nothing that had no bearing on your life. The meandering nature of the narrative pulls you in, slowly and thoroughly, where detail is everything, and what was said wasn't as important as how it all felt. In the end, as for me, I wound up with lusciously, luxuriously absolutely no information, and a lot of time invested in the wondrous feeling of nothingness -- the nothingness of youth, the nothingness of timelessness, the nothingness of endlessness.
Thanks again for a great summer.
Thanks again for a great summer.
November 22, 2010
If you consider yourself stupid or lazy, you probably shouldn't try to read this book. If you've never read any Faulker, read some Faulkner, then get back to us. Stones of Summer is challenging and epic. Highly poetic; some of the most beautiful phrases and concepts/sentences/imagery of any book I can recall. One of those books discovered more recently; i.e. a forgotten/underrecognized literary classic now enjoying literary fame. Difficult in some ways; if you enjoy the idea of reading Sound and the Fury mixed with Stand By Me, you'll really enjoy. If that, to you, sounds like a terrible idea, go back to your Harry Potter.
August 20, 2017
Hypnotic, mesmerizing, hallucinatory prose. Turns of phrases so imaginative and revelatory as to boldly defy all convention.
Anyone who came of age in the 60s and 70s will feel at home in this book. It is an important book. Seminal. I can see why the Lost Books Club and Barnes and Noble re-published and so heavily promoted it.
Anyone who came of age in the 60s and 70s will feel at home in this book. It is an important book. Seminal. I can see why the Lost Books Club and Barnes and Noble re-published and so heavily promoted it.
June 9, 2009
easily top 5 books that I have ever read
May 25, 2021
I can't really remember what I rated this the first time I read it - probably 4 stars. When I read it about 5 or 6 years ago I found the sort of post-60s, coming of age tenor to the novel fascinating and its depictions of the protagonists' life exciting.
Now I'm older and rereading it, I find its impact a bit different. The novel is at times wonderfully, vividly written, but as many times long and overly verbose to little effect. There's sometimes a lack of clarity about developments or issues that are fairly critical to the plot, such as Dawes' underlying conditions, which makes Dawes himself read like he's being batshit for laughs. Since it largely focuses on Dawes and his perspective, it makes sense that the characters around him are less complex and serve more as a two-dimensional mirrors towards his increasingly degraded mental state. But it's still unfortunate that some of the formative characters to why Dawes becomes so deranged, including his friends, rarely get much in the way of development.
I remember distinctively disliking the third act of the book, and in many ways I still do. It's long, confusing, and sees Dawes acting in a way that is an almost total departure from himself in the first and second acts (though not entirely). Rereading it makes it a bit clearer what and why Mossman wrote it and Dawes the same way, and I did like some of the thought spirals Dawes gets into. However, it's still long, confusing, and filled with drawn out scenes that have basically no bearing on the plot overall. Dawes doesn't learn or change from, say, the train arc; he's the same person at the end of the story, except with a further deteriorated state, which I guess is kind of the point. It didn't change the fact that it was tedious to read.
I enjoyed it and think it's a decent book to pick up at a used book sale, like where I got mine for $0.95. It's not as amazing as I remember it, but I definitely got something different out of it.
Now I'm older and rereading it, I find its impact a bit different. The novel is at times wonderfully, vividly written, but as many times long and overly verbose to little effect. There's sometimes a lack of clarity about developments or issues that are fairly critical to the plot, such as Dawes' underlying conditions, which makes Dawes himself read like he's being batshit for laughs. Since it largely focuses on Dawes and his perspective, it makes sense that the characters around him are less complex and serve more as a two-dimensional mirrors towards his increasingly degraded mental state. But it's still unfortunate that some of the formative characters to why Dawes becomes so deranged, including his friends, rarely get much in the way of development.
I remember distinctively disliking the third act of the book, and in many ways I still do. It's long, confusing, and sees Dawes acting in a way that is an almost total departure from himself in the first and second acts (though not entirely). Rereading it makes it a bit clearer what and why Mossman wrote it and Dawes the same way, and I did like some of the thought spirals Dawes gets into. However, it's still long, confusing, and filled with drawn out scenes that have basically no bearing on the plot overall. Dawes doesn't learn or change from, say, the train arc; he's the same person at the end of the story, except with a further deteriorated state, which I guess is kind of the point. It didn't change the fact that it was tedious to read.
I enjoyed it and think it's a decent book to pick up at a used book sale, like where I got mine for $0.95. It's not as amazing as I remember it, but I definitely got something different out of it.
February 14, 2019
I make it a point of pride to finish a book that I start. In the case of The Stones of Summer, it required stubborn pride. There are enough glowing reviews of this book that I hoped to love it. There are indeed flashes of genius and eloquence, sentences and passages that turn what on the surface seems like obtuse, fragmented language into powerful feelings and connections. But there were far too many long, rambling, extremely disjointed sections that frustrated me, numbed my attention, left me wondering what the author was possibly trying to convey, or where he was trying to take me. Honestly, many sentences reminded me of Mad Libs - the sentences were properly constructed but certain words were wholly out of place, as if an adjective or noun was selected with a random word generator. I get that Mossman uses language in an inside-out, wildly disruptive way but I often felt that it was the work of someone who was trying too hard to deliver a work of genius. And I get that the main character was descending into (or already in) madness in the third book (where the rambling discourses were often unbearable), but it shouldn’t take 200+ pages of messiness to live that. Perhaps this was the author’s way of immersing the reader in schizophrenia, but it was overkill, a bludgeoning. Overall, I can only hand this book two stars - three for the first book, two for the second, and something less than one star for the third. I have read many of the five star reviews in Goodreads for The Stones of Summer, but it didn’t take me there, or even close to there.
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