The Hair of Harold Roux [Hardcover]

Thomas Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1974

In fiction one plays a strange game with ugliness and fear.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Winner of the National Book Award

 

"The Hair of Harold Roux is breathtakingly good. The pages are alive with all the gilded vitality of realism's silkiest champions (John Updike, John Cheever), but it also anticipates the novelist-within-a-novel artifice honed later by Philip Roth in his Zuckerman books. It's a joy and a thrill to read." - Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

"Writing must make its own way in the world, and often, the best stuff (and believe me, The Hair of Harold Roux is among the best stuff) falls to the side. Who can say what the culture notices, and why? But with the re-release of The Hair of Harold Roux, we have the opportunity for a bit of literary reclamation ... 36 years after it won the National Book Award and promptly disappeared." - "Jacket Copy," LATimes.com

 

"[Why it works] has a lot to do with Williams' rigorous sense of interior examination, the minute-by-minute way he traces the existence of his middle-aged protagonist, a man beset equally by responsibility and the sense that time is no longer on his side. This is hardly an uncommon set of circumstances, but here it becomes the stuff of a minor epic drama... Williams constructs a novel that is as simple on the surface as it is nuanced and dense underneath." - David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

 

"A superb and engrossing achievement." -Joseph Heller

 

"The language flows from the purest vernacular to the elevations demanded by distilled perception. Our larges sympathies are roused, tormented, and consoled." -Washington Post Book World

 

"[This] novel is terrific: it is sweet, funny, and sexy... Williams is an accomplished magician." -Newsweek

 

"Williams proves once again he can do almost anything with words. This is literature." - Publishers Weekly

 

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

5 1/2 x 8 1/2 trim. LC 94-44582 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 373 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394489888
• ISBN-13: 978-0394489889
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,774,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars our adventures, after a time, are mostly fantasies, November 27, 2007

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hair of Harold Roux (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England) (Paperback)

The Hair of Harold Roux is a lost classic. I had to recall it from the Library Annex. The last time my copy was in reading hands was 1983. William's novel explores both misspent youth and middle age in this novel about a novelist which could have easily descended into the uninteresting or banal. But Williams pulls it off, partly through the vibrant portraits of the virginal Mary and the randy Naomi, in the novel-within-a-novel. Here, ugly characterizations of women and minorities may be one reason for the relative obscurity of this work. But there is no authorial commitment to these views: it is a work of fantasy within a work of fantasy and safe from endorsement. All in all, the novel illustrates how time can reduce men and women as mirrors reflecting their memories.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyman, June 30, 2011

By 

Paul G. Gigas (West Paris, ME USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hair of Harold Roux: A Novel (Paperback)

The Hair of Harold Roux, a book by Thomas Williams, is the most consistently interesting book I have ever read. It puts forth first and foremost characters who are so alive and surprising they never lose their interest. They vibrate whether crude or kindly through their times. Just as you think you have met a character whose reality can be matched by no other along comes another one human and real beyond imagination. Thomas Williams has the classic skill of brevity and simplicity. His style is the style of his characters whose speech lives. Williams is a master of living language. He has committed the cardinal sin of twentieth century writers: he has touched ordinary life and lived to write honestly about it. His naturalism is a beautiful blend of joy and suffering. In simple language, which he imbues with the fountain of imagination, his everyman, Aaron Benham (Allard Benson), proceeds through the tangle of his naturalistic universe whether on a motorcyle or within the vehicle of his dark nostalgia. There's nothing out there quite like it. Humility and serenity blend exquisitely with poetic anguish. There is much that I could say, for it is one of my favorite books. In a sorry time when literature has become blind and black and careless of understanding this book and other of Thomas Williams' books become like a warm campfire in a dark and terrible woods. The joy in his books reminds me of the Joy that used to be such as in Beethoven's monument (I'm serious), and the anguish haunting the shadows of his characters is the anguish of war, dismemberment, rage, failure, loneliness, loss. When I open this book, I know I can open it at any time and any page, I think to myself--yes, finally.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novel about a man writing a novel in which a character writes a novel which has a character who has also written a novel., June 27, 2011

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Hair of Harold Roux: A Novel (Paperback)

In this supremely literary and very exciting National Book Award winner from 1975, newly reprinted, Thomas Williams, an almost forgotten author, creates a novel about fiction writing and its relationship to the "immensities" with which every human being must contend during his lifetime. In presenting his story, Williams creates, first, Aaron Benham, a professor at a small New England college in the 1970s. Benham is writing a novel entitled The Hair of Harold Roux, in which the "thinly disguised" hero is twenty-one year-old Allard Benson, a college student on the G. I. Bill just after the close of World War II. Allard is fascinated by Mary Tolliver, a naïve freshman and devout Catholic whom he hopes to seduce. Harold Roux, an extremely sensitive romantic, is also studying on the G. I. Bill, but he must deal with the mockery and bullying of cruder, crueler students. Harold lost his hair during the war and wears a terrible toupee which he believes makes him more attractive to women. He is writing a love story called Glitter and Gold, in which a main character is also writing a novel.

While Prof. Aaron Benson is writing his story set in the well-described 1940s, he is living his own life in the 1970s, just before the end of the Vietnam War. College departments are pushing the "publish or perish" requirement for tenure and have made the life of at least one of Aaron's friends a misery, while also exerting pressure on Aaron himself. His need to write his novel has created some problems in his marriage, and he often invents personal fantasies about what he has missed with regard to other women. It is the sometimes frightening stories he creates for his children, ages six and eight, that reveal his fascination with the dramatic effects of fiction. Cuddling with them on the couch as he spins his stories, he literally "feels the story with their reality," an event so full of emotion that "he loses his voice."

As he creates Allard's novel, Thomas Williams writes some of the best and most excitingly sensuous descriptions ever. Both Aaron Benham and Allard Benson describe the freedom of flying down the road on their vintage motorcycles, Aaron indicating that only then does he "feel the symmetry of having made something out of chaos" simply by arriving home safely. When Allard Benson meets Mary Tolliver's father, he notes that the yellow-brown skin on Mr. Tolliver's face "hung as though draped over his head and tacked here and there, at the corners of his eyes and where his ears were attached to his head." When Allard visits a friend at a miniature village, he rides on a hand-crafted railway with a 1/6 scale locomotive. Sporting "three brass lanterns on its front end...the engine seemed to peer straight ahead with the powerful yet slightly moronic, clownish intensity of a cyclops."

Constantly playing with fiction vs. reality, fiction as part of reality, fiction as an alternative to reality, and the special fictions one creates for love, Williams creates a powerful, dramatic novel, filled with events which keep the reader constantly involved with his characters. It is only when sordid reality destroys all the fictions that someone has created in order to cope with everyday life, that one recognizes just how important it is to keep going by creating newer but more realistic fictions. Mary Whipple