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134 of 136 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazing book! Ulysses meets a Confederacy of Dunces, January 26, 2004
I, like a lot of people, read this book after seeing "Stone Reader." Basically, I wanted to know what kind of book would inspire such a great movie. The answer to that is complicated, but the upshot is that I enjoyed reading this book very much. The three parts of this book have very different styles from each other. The first part reads more like poetry than prose. There are rich descriptions that leave more of an impression rather than a telling. The second part focuses on dialog with much fewer descriptions. I found the dialogs to be very real. The third part uses out-of-time-line narrative, writings (including the start of a novel) by the main character, letters from other characters, and other techniques. The overall impression is that this novel is like James Joyce's Ulysses: a massive and well-constructed work. I am amazed that a first-time writer could create this book. As to the story, there can be no doubt that the main character has few redeeming values; he is difficult to like. He and his "friends" (does he really form any real relationships with anyone?) do many violent and vicious things to themselves and others. How can you like that? In some ways, though, Dawes Williams reminds me of Ignatius Reilly in "A Confederacy of Dunces". Both characters are quite repulsive. Ignatius has none of Dawes' violent nature. Where Ignatius' life seems to always backfire on him, Dawes' life seems to result from Dawes' explicit attack on it. Repulsive, violent, vicious--what's to like about that? For me, though, I like the book. I find the construction and prose to be incredible. There is a wit and creativity behind this book I admire even if I don't admire the characters in it.
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92 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable and Unforgettable Book, December 21, 2004
Let me begin by saying that, had I discovered this book on my own, without Mark Moskowittz's STONE READER documentary, I would have been recommending it to every serious reader I know. I approached it with some reservation, expecting to find an overhyped work that had gone out of print for good reason, but I was utterly captivated within the first five pages. Fifty pages in, I was saying "Wow!"
Dow Mossman's THE STONES OF SUMMER seems to attract a remarkable degree of vitriol from reviewers. Readers apparently either love it or hate it, perhaps somewhat the way people respond to modern art. It is surely a far from perfect work, but rather than pick nits about individual sentences and images, I found myself reading right through them, accepting them for the atmosphere they create as if I was reading poetry. For me, at least, the story flowed into a larger societal picture that resonated with the sense of betrayal and despair generated by the antiwar, counterculture movement of the late 1960's.
THE STONES OF SUMMER is a remarkable first novel, and sadly, an apparently last novel as well. As past reviews suggest, it is also not everyone's cup of tea. This book is not a mindless summer read, nor is it a page-turning thriller. But readers whose tastes run to Saramago, Pynchon, DeLillo, Faulkner, or Garcia Marquez are likely to find Dow Mossman's book intriguing and enjoyable (if less polished), a deeply felt story wrapped in prose so exuberant, so manically transcendent, it practically leaps off the page and grabs you by the throat. Unlike so many popular works (Ludlum, Grisham, King, Cussler, Clancy, etc.) whose stories are as memorable as last week's hot dog, this is a book you will never forget.
On its surface, THE STONES OF SUMMER tells the coming of age story of Iowa-born Dawes Oldham Williams (D.O.W.) in three segments. The first takes place when a precocious, eight year old Dawes visits his grandfather's racing greyhound farm during summer vacation, with flashbacks to Dawes' relationship and adventures with a troublemaking friend named Ronnie Crown. The second segment occurs 7-10 years later, during Dawes' rather wild and crazy high school years, ending in tragedy on his last night at home before college. The final section takes place another ten years later and finds Dawes on his way to, and living in, Mexico, still trying to cope with personal losses, hopelessness, and borderline schizophrenia.
Each section of the book speaks in its own voice. The opening, 1949-1950 segment is densely written, filled with the soaring, spiraling imagery for which the book is best known. We are introduced to Dawes' ineffectual, Donna Reed mother and nearly as bland stepfather, a dark and imposing grandfather with a hair-trigger temper and dog-eat-dog temperament reminiscent of Joe McCarthy, and a sybil-like neighbor woman named Abigail Winas who raises chickens and all but reads their entrails. The second section, 1956-1961, is more chronologically told in somewhat more straightforward prose and dialog, suggesting the sexual and cultural revolution just then beginning. The final section, 1967-1968, is almost hallucinatory, filled with journal writings, letters, a short novel by Dawes, and a story line about sanity, drugs, Vietnam, and the sexual revolution.
THE STONES OF SUMMER deals with the great American awakening from 1950 to 1968, culminating with the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the death of American innocence. It is a novel about personal identity and individuality, alienation, the role of history (both personal and national), and the relativity of truth. In the end, it is also a story of rebellion against tradition and cultural mores and the burdens falling upon those who rebel. The message is classic, the execution is powerful, the story is tragic. Writing in 1972, Mossman proved prescient about the absurdity of American culture and political values, going so far as to conjecture about the ridiculous notion of Ronald Reagan as a President! Dawes Williams would have laughed until he cried if he had seen what has come to pass with the Bush Administration's manufacturing of its own history with regard to Iraq: WMD's, toppling Saddam's statue, Jessica Lynch, the Thanksgiving turkey, "Mission Accomplished," "We're making good progress. They all love us," and the like. He had seen the enemy, and it was us. Aaatttssssss Dawes!
There is certainly room for valid criticism of this book. The female characters lack depth, the prose is sometimes just too extravagant, the literary allusions lack subtlety, some of the dialog is pretentious to the point of self-parody, and the Huck Finn references (particularly Dawes having a girlfriend named Becky Thatcher) are overplayed. Yet despite these drawbacks, Dow Mossman masterfully captures America's own coming of age story in a way few authors have.
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49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Wonderful book, May 10, 2005
Some other reviews here do a great job of describing the way the book works in manner much better than I can, so I'll leave that to them. I just want say why I loved it, and why I think so many reviewers would violently disagree with me.
This novel blew me away. Some may complain about the unorthadox word choices, but I totally dug that. It's odd, but it works. I didn't just manage to navigate through it, I loved it. There's nothing quite like it in fiction. Probably only in poetry you will find such language. Don't let what people say about how difficult the writing is scare you away from this. If you're having trouble with it, just hang in there, you'll get use to it, and will probably be in love with the novel by page 150.
One of the intersting things about the language is how closely it is related to character. This is not a first person story, yet the language of the book is the language of Dawes Williams. The phrases that don't make sense often come to make much more sense, and become incredibly powerful as they reappear later in the book. For example, no one quite gets it when a conversation is described as being like "great wood eyes" in the first paragraph, but at the end of the second book (but don't skip ahead) this means something much more too us. By book three we begin to suspect that this actually is in some ways first person,that the character Dawes Williams is writing the text, or even the author of the book.
What is repeated constantly takes on great meaning. Words like wood, water and especially stone. The word stone for me has forever been impacted by this book. It feels like magic to me whenever it comes up in conversation, or in another book. Stone. It's strange. Becuase of this book that word means so so much to me.
Mossman's use of language in this book is a lot closer to the way a poet uses language than a fiction writer. At times he picks words that circumvent literal denotative meaning, conscious meaning even, in order to create a feeling, an emotion,that reaches underneath the surface. This will be an easier read for you if you are use to reading poetry. The sheer beauty of the writing at times brought tears to my eyes.
Story wise, this book is wonderful. Another thing that might put off some readers is the episodic nature of the plot. What Mossman gives you is snippets of a childhood, so many events are less related to each other than in a conventional novel. The purpose of the book isn't to develop a plot, but to develop a character. But the episodes are wonderfully done, as Mark Moscowitz said, there are so many great stories, often hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking.
The way the book is divided between childhood and young adulthood has similarities with Jonathan Lethem's recent book Fortress of Solitude, which I also loved, so if you didn't like the pace in that book, you probably won't like it here.
This is possibly the greatest book I've read. My brother and I read it at the same time, and now we are out of our damn minds for it. We shall both read it again this summer. I'm trying to get everyone I know to read it. Don't believe what some of the other reviews say. This is a difficult book, and I don't think it's found its ideal audience yet, since the only people who know about it are the ones who watched THE STONE READER.
There's something really nice about the film, and it speaks to all readers, but the book doesn't. If you are the type that requires breakneck speed, prose that can be chugged like cheap beer, or if you consider any kind of expirmentation with the form of the novel pretentious, this is not the book for you. The main force that moves this book is not a single plot. There are many small and engrossing plots that will take you mabye twenty-five pages at a time through the book, but what really moves this book for me is character and language. I've said it many times before in this review, but the language is so incredibly rich. I read many passages twice as I was reading it, and return to a few others again after I had finished. Mossman said that he thought of this book as a giant poem.
The movie is good, but sadly the filmmaker is a larger figure in the movie than the author. And even sadder, the film seems to have more fans than the book.
But, long story short, read Mossman, you will be better for it. You will understand why someone would want to make a movie about it.
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