The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman

From Barnes & Noble

Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's first and only novel is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that spans three decades in the life of irrepressible 1950s teen Dawes Williams. Earning its author comparisons to no less than James Joyce, J. D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, this great American novel developed a passionate cult following -- even as it went out of print for more than 20 years -- and recently inspired Mark Moskowitz's award-winning film Stone Reader. View a video clip from the film.

From the Publisher

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

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

The New York Times Book Review - John Seelye

"The Stones of Summer" cannot possibly be called a promising first novel for the simple reason that it is such a marvelous achievement that it puts forth much more than mere promise. Fulfillment is perhaps the best word, fulfillment at the first stroke, which is so often the sign of superior talent.... Dow Mossman's novel is a whole river of words fed by a torrential imagination.... For me at least, reading "The Stones of Summer" was crossing another Rubicon, discovering a different sensibility, a brave new world of conciousness. "The Stones of Summer" is a holy book, and it burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon-fire, stone-fire.

Publishers Weekly

After its 1972 publication, this sprawling, modernist Great American Novel-style epic garnered its author critical comparison to Faulkner, for its saga of rural dynastic decline; Salinger, for its mood of youthful alienation; and Joyce, for its labyrinthine, cryptically allusive, stream-of-consciousness renditions of the private psyche. The episodic coming-of-age narrative follows budding writer Dawes Williams from boyhood on his grandfather's greyhound ranch, through a feckless Iowa adolescence of drinking and joyriding, to a mentally unstable adulthood in which, through rants against propriety, positivism and the establishment and a terminal bout of countercultural dissoluteness in Mexico, he becomes the voice of the 1960s' lost generation. The real action, though, is the development of Dawes's writerly sensibility, his-i.e., the author's-knack for transmuting the dross of reality into the gold of literary metaphor. But Mossman's own lyrical, metaphorical sensibility tends toward pseudo-profundities ("[h]er body was an inward fall, a deep spiral of musky sea lying easily within itself"), abstractions ("[s]he had a metaphysical eye, as blue as perfect nightmares"), and a synesthetic scrambling of sensory categories ("[h]e felt he could not listen to the light anymore, that it stood off in the distance, wordless with impossible opinion"). Long out of print before this reissue, the novel has generated a cult following among those who find in its inchoate but intense imagery the very portrait of the young artist's soul. But many readers may find the book's hallucinatory prose-"In the beginning there was me, green smoke and oatmeal, conscious light, all looking for a shoe to rise from"-interesting but self-indulgent, and the plot insufficiently gripping. (Oct. 22) Forecast: B&N CEO Steve Riggio secured the chain's right to reissue this epic for a healthy six figures in a deal that also helps finance distribution of the independent film about Mossman, Stone Reader. The Stones of Summer is an achievement, but at 600 dense pages, B&N may end up deciding it's better to stick to the classics. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Published to mostly critical acclaim in 1972 -LJ's reviewer hated it-this book, along with its author, disappeared anyway. The story, however, has found new life via the film The Stone Reader, so you might want a copy. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

The Boston Phoenix - William Kowinski

That the contemporary struggles of the young can be effectively and ingeniously rendered is proven by The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman's epic novel of the growth of a young man in the cortex and context of middle America.... His mastery of character and dialogue is astounding.

Baltimore Sun

...a charming, poignantly funny and often brilliant autobiographical novel that trumpets the arrival of a major talent.— Paul Chutkow

The New York Times - Thomas Laks

The single fact that emerges from a reading of "The Stones of Summer" is of Dow Mossman's considerable talent.... He has an endless supply of comic invention, a lyrical and sweet tone as natural to his writing as the song of a bird, and a way to use, manipulate and build on the tall tale that goes to the very heart of America writing.

The Los Angeles Times - Russell W. Schoch, Jr.

The writing is rich, lush, a full harvest of words....

The New York Times

The single fact that emerges from a reading of "The Stones of Summer" is of Dow Mossman's considerable talent.... He has an endless supply of comic invention, a lyrical and sweet tone as natural to his writing as the song of a bird, and a way to use, manipulate and build on the tall tale that goes to the very heart of America writing. — Thomas Lask

<em>Linton Weeks</em> - The Washington Post

If you read "The Stones of Summer," you'll discover that it's rare in other ways. As a first novel, it's roller-coaster breathtaking -- in its derring-do and in its defeats. Mossman is obsessed with language and the madcap magic it can conjure. The protagonist, Dawes Williams, is a precocious Iowa kid living in a foulmouthed, foible-filled world. And the landscape Mossman draws is unbelievable -- until you read a hundred pages or so and start to believe it.

William Kowinski - Boston Phoenix

That the contemporary struggles of the young can be effectively and ingeniously rendered is proven by The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman's epic novel of the growth of a young man in the cortex and context of middle America.... His mastery of character and dialogue is astounding.

The Washington Post - Linton Weeks

If you read "The Stones of Summer," you'll discover that it's rare in other ways. As a first novel, it's roller-coaster breathtaking -- in its derring-do and in its defeats. Mossman is obsessed with language and the madcap magic it can conjure. The protagonist, Dawes Williams, is a precocious Iowa kid living in a foulmouthed, foible-filled world. And the landscape Mossman draws is unbelievable -- until you read a hundred pages or so and start to believe it.

Los Angeles Times

The writing is rich, lush, a full harvest of words.... — Russell W. Schoch Jr.

The Baltimore Sun - Paul Chutkow

...a charming, poignantly funny and often brilliant autobiographical novel that trumpets the arrival of a major talent.

What People Are Saying

C. D.B. Bryan
I don't believe the phrase "first novel" can adequately describe a book this exuberant, complex, funny, fat, touching, infuriating, lyric and vicious.

The Stones of Summer is a complex, original, and passionate novel written at fever pitch, as wonderful as it is difficult, and ultimately very rewarding. Imagine Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy collaborating on a book titled Under the Volcano/Call it Sleep. The climax is an astonishing tour de force. The Stones of Summer is one of those surprising and unafraid works-of-art that breaks all the rules with manic intensity and fabulous language, leaving us breathless at the end. All hail its return!
— John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

Product Details

• ISBN: 064176054X
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641760549
• Format: Hardcover, 576pp
• Publisher: Sterling Publishing
• Pub. Date: October 2003
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Edition Number: 1

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

Mossman's novel is divided into three parts. The first is a lyrical, perfectly distilled rendering of the boyhood of an introspective, mystical Iowan named Dawes Williams, the hero of The Stones of Summer. With a poetic technique that has drawn comparisons to William Faulkner and James Joyce, Mossman maps the sensitive soul of young Dawes. The boy's "dreaminess" sets the tone -- this is a book that invites readers to think about their dreams, their personal and even artistic response to what the world puts before them. Reading groups will in particular find much to explore in Mossman's dazzling language and brilliant descriptive powers.

The second section picks up with Dawes as a considerably wilder 18-year-old whose energies are now directed outward into a life of drunken, misbegotten adventures with a motley group of male friends -- and, of course, toward women. The story turns to rough-and-tumble comedy, with the perfected language of Part 1 being replaced by a new set of voices: Dawes and his friends, as they play, argue, drink, and make love, speak a rowdy, unmistakably American language that groups will find both hilarious and fascinating. Their adventures evoke both On the Road and Henry Fielding's high-spirited Tom Jones, as Dawes seeks in his often disastrous impulses a breakthrough from the ordinary. With chaotic humor, the author sends Dawes and his friends on a joyride through late adolescence -- but it soon becomes clear that despite his heroic efforts to escape the limitations of his world, Dawes remains a part of it.

Reading groups will discover in the third section of The Stones of Summer the gripping, tragic dimension of Dawes's story -- the late 1960s finds the young man, ten years older, in a seaside town in Mexico. He is the author of an unfinished novel, and suffers from an even more pronounced sense of separation from reality. Mossman painfully confronts questions of how the visionary artist finds a place in the world, and whether the cost of a truly individual relationship to reality is...sanity itself. Through it all, The Stones of Summer never loses sight of the boy it began with, and reading groups will find that Dawes's journey from innocence to experience provides a wealth of topics for discussion. And Mossman's feverish, irrepressible language, bursting with imagery and provocative metaphor, will leave with many book club members a memory to savor -- the sound of an unforgettable American voice. Bill Tipper

Discussion Questions from the Publisher
1. The final scene in the book can almost appear to be a collection of fragments. What do you think happens? How would you interpret the final sentence, " 'You can't get away with this stuff,' Dawes Williams'd thought. 'Nobody can.' " What does this say about the novel's conclusion?

2. The author has suggested that The Stones of Summer can be thought of in the Shakespearean tradition of comedy and tragedy, but has questioned whether the story should be described as a comedy or a tragedy. What do you think? How does the author mix comic and tragic elements in the novel? Does either triumph in the end?

3. There is a significant difference in how the writer evokes a strong sense of time and place between Book 1 "A Stone of a Day" and Book 2, "The Stones of Night." How do his specific descriptions of place in Part 1 and of relationships in Part II invoke memories of your own?

4. Book 3 contains long excerpts of Dawes Williams' journals. How does the author use these journals as a narrative device? What is the relationship between the book we are reading, and the book that Dawes is (possibly) trying to write?

5. Much of Dawes' energy as a young man is spent in a conscious rebellion against authority. Who are important authority figures in The Stones of Summer? Arthur (the grandfather) is certainly one of the most obvious authority figures; are there others of equal significance? Do you think that there are ways that Dawes himself becomes an authority figure by the end of the book?

6. Discuss the role of women in the book. How do the primary women in Book 1 and Book 3 differ from Summer Letch? How does Dawes attitude toward women develop through the story? What do you think we are meant to understand about his capacity for relationships with women?

7. Although The Stones of Summer does not use the first person perspective, the "point of view" of the narrator is often somewhat mysterious. Whose point of view is this? Is it Dawes' own perspective, as narrated through the third person? If it is Dawes', how is that perspective influencing the "reality" the reader is seeing? If it isn't Dawes', what is the nature of the point of view we do get?

8. Whose writing do you think Dow Mossman emulates? He's been critically compared to everyone from William Faulkner to J.D. Salinger, Malcolm Lowry to Larry McMurtry. Do you agree? Who would you choose? Are there other names you would add to this list?

9. The author likes to describe Dawes Williams as "growing up seriously absurd." (an expression that was popularized in the 1960s by Paul Goodman's classic nonfiction work Growing Up Absurd). In what ways does The Stones of Summer resemble other "coming-of-age" novels? In what ways is it different?

10. What would you say is the theme of this book? Does it have a single theme?

11. The author often describes his book as a "narrative poem" and a "mock epic." Do you agree? How does the poetic element of the author's style influence the effect of the story? How might the idea of the "mock epic" - originally a form of poetry that applied heroic forms and metaphors to more ordinary events, creating a humorous or satirical effect - be at work in this story? What do you think the writer is trying to do or say with humor?

12. The author has often said, "this book is 98% autobiography with only a few stretchers" but also has said that he "hopes that readers will see it as 100% fiction." This is complicated by the fact that the letters from Vietnam in The Stones of Summer are, according to the author, real letters. What do you think the author is trying to say about fact and fiction? Discuss the tension between fiction and fact in a book that draws heavily upon an author's experience. Does the author's statement about "autobiography" change your response to the story?

Read an Excerpt

When August came, thick as a dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and then they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood. August was always an endless day, he felt, white as wood, slow as light. Dawes shifted about in his seat, uncomfortable, watching the land slide past. It was late, a steady progression of night; the conversations inside the car were like great wood eyes and, driving west over Iowa, the evening was always air vague with towns, blue fences, and crossroads vacant of cars. He watched the deserted country porches slide by like lonely pickets guarding the gray, outbreaking storm of sky; like juts of rock.

They were going to the farm again, like all those other summers, he thought. He grew restless, like something stuck to his seat in a movie theatre; like something being made only to watch everything at once, and his mother, Leone, Arthur's daughter, would feed him crackers and Coke and tell him they couldn't possibly stop at another service station because her parents, Arthur and especially Gin, were growing older now so they must reach the farm before midnight. The new '50 Chevy was silent and green, smelling almost of iron linen, as they rode down the last of day, and the boy would ask about the greyhounds again, and why his grandfather didn't simply raise corn like the other farmers. Simpson would take the cold cigar from his mouth and say:

"Yes sir, old boy. Art still grows some corn for the science of it, but Arthur's a smart man for a farmer, and knows that greyhounds are the best crop that can be taken from Iowa."

. . . .

Sitting on the living-room floor, playing the latest chic game -- composed mostly of a single wooden frame and some Newtonian steelies swinging together on strings -- flown in from New York with Mrs. Harrison Rawlings, Sr., Dawes Williams suddenly felt if he ever wanted to describe the perfect circle of Ratshit's life, he would need an example. And sitting there, watching the steel balls describe perfectly inert actions against one another as they spun perfectly retraced parabolas in the air, Dawes Wil­liams suddenly figured it this way: Ratshit Rawlings idolized, much too openly, the older athletes; and the side that Ratshit idolized was the blatant fuck-up side. In the eyes of Ratshit Rawlings, to be an all-American, clean-cut, crew-cut fuck-up was a sophisticated thing. Throwing it all away in the end was the epitome of style. And, still sitting there watching the steel balls rebound against one another with a perfect, repeating, waning symmetry, Dawes Williams felt even that he had found the example to prove it all:

One night they had all sat in the gym that was also the auditorium watching the varsity practice. A stage set for Booth Tarkington's Seventeen was set against the far wall like a pink summer cloud, nature-given; an archaic vision of near innocence the moment it was painted, a hollow log of a stage just waiting for the players, waiting for the sophisticated kid from Chicago to come rolling into town in his gay, hopelessly affluent yet somehow rustic, yellow, open-air roadster meant for stopping at illicit roadhouses just over the county line. The basketball court lay its naked four-square reality in front.

The late, gray winter shadows had come from the chicken-wire windows leaving only cages of shade to overlay a painted-on-cardboard summer gazebo. Dawes Williams thought he had been sitting there, trapped only in his skin, in Iowa which was really the same as Indiana, in the exact middle of the twentieth century. Coach Orville Boggs watched, whistle-mouthed, the late practice like a Florentine prince who was unaware except for the fact that he was vaguely conscious of being asleep. Everyone was tense, because the team was miraculously in the finals of the sectionals. Willis Skokes began a slow, deliberate, rhythmic dribble down the floor. He was bringing the ball down, right hand raised in signal, a screaming banshee without a sound, the middle finger extended, and the yellow-shirted second string eyed him with the stare of a single animal. The gym hushed itself and became a closed box. Dawes Williams thought the tension was terrific. Willis Skokes was approaching midcourt. The stars came out. What would he do? Drive it? Fade softly as night into the lane, past a screen, and jump-shoot it? Drive in like a furious cat and then, at the last moment, with great grace and magnanimity, bounce-pass it off? The sun wavered in the west; then decided to fall in again. Suddenly -- with feeling -- Willis Skokes merely tucked the ball under his arm like a movie of Goose Tatum, did a small bunny-hop, a Chaplin walk three times round the center circle, he swiveled his butt in two cutely contradictory movements and he ... he fired the ball from midcourt. Good God, Dawes Williams thought, sitting there, there is no precedent for this. Good God, Dawes Williams thought, it rose, rises, in a speechless arc and then falls against the back wall of the gym with the sound of a small fish being hammered to death on a flat, dry rock.

HE HAD DRAWN NO IRON.

He had drawn no iron, and Coach Orville Boggs slumped to the floor, his life over. A life once dedicated quietly to example and youth, the American way, was now over and lost in the deep winter shadows of an unpretentious gym. He was finished. He had failed. With nearly his last breath he ordered Skokes from the gym, the entire building. Orville Boggs' arm extended baroquely toward the door, offering nothing, saying simply:

"Willis, leave us please," with some last dignity.

And with that, Willis Skokes turned on his heel, like a French clown, to an audience deathly shocked with pity and adoration that approached self-recognition and horror, he bowed, smiled like a faggot, and walked to the door on his hands.

When Ratshit Rawlings saw that happen, he knew there was God.

. . . .

Willis Skokes would never play again, but then it didn't matter: he had become a legend and, besides, Eddie said he would probably be banging his girl Dixie Kakes again in a mere matter of hours anyway.

Only Ratshit died. He never recovered. He lay broken-backed over two auditorium chairs and laughed a high, echoing rill for nearly an hour. In the end, Dawes Williams carried him home and left him on his mother's stoop, like carrying a drunk with one separated arm and shoulder. He didn't come to school; and he didn't eat. He just lay in his room and became periodically hysterical. From the day he arose, Ratshit Rawlings believed firmly in Willis Skokes. He emulated him; studied him in the halls; talked about him incessantly. Finally, Ratshit even analyzed him. He discussed him, frankly, some years later, in terms of Christ-like salvation. It grew. It became mythic; and at the center remained always the image of Willis Skokes; Willis T. Skokes as the personification of -- "I could have done it all right, if I had so chosen: but fortunately for me and my being I did not so choose."

Because you weren't a fuck-off if you chose to become one. Anyone in Rapid Cedar could tell you that. Even Travis Thomas almost understood that. And so, from an early age, Ratshit Rawlings had chosen an unclassi­cal variation on a court-jester theme in which, by merely choosing to play the fool, he thought he would be able eventually to mock, enlighten, finally even rise above the king; the entire system of the king, his father, Mr. Harrison "Ratshit" Rawlings, Sr. Dawes Williams understood it. He watched it grow; he watched it all flower like a manure-headed weed until finally, breaking through, festering into a field of only sun after all of those years of rising through soil, it became suddenly self-conscious and merely eccentric. And that was ironic, or maybe it wasn't, because Ratshit Rawl­ings claimed some obscure New England Transcendentalist as ancestor and because, Dawes Williams thought finally, Ratshit must have inherited Willis Skokes like some brilliant seed of a gene that never quite bloomed; that refused to hatch back over in this dreaming, more technical air; that had somehow got choked, blackened, inverted and reversed somewhere along the way. In the end, Dawes Williams could remember Ratshit Rawl­ings talking of Willis Skokes in terms of being some kind of a secular oversoul.

Soon Dawes Williams, who was not really playing with Mrs. Rawlings' Newtonian steelies anyway, roused himself from his dreaming and began to watch Eddie, who was sitting over in the corner, watching him back. Eddie was looking back over at him, and they were beginning to watch each other think. Eddie, Dawes Williams knew without asking, was sitting over there thinking that Dawes Williams was dreaming up another of about the biggest batches of crap he had ever heard. Eddie knew that Dawes Williams liked to distort things, to make them complicated for the hell of it. He knew that Ratshit Rawlings was often a whipped-out bastard that couldn't cut it. He knew that there was just a lot of Ratshit Rawlings in Dawes Williams too, by God. He knew mostly that Ratshit Rawlings was only good for games when things got dull. And that he, Eddie himself, had a Welshman's liver and a limited explanation for things; and that although Dawes Williams was one of his best friends, he hated his guts....

It was still Saturday afternoon, and everyone was waiting, waiting for the Rawlingses to leave for Iowa City. Just then, however, everyone was watching as Mr. Harrison Rawlings, Sr., busily and drunkenly threw Rat­shit's entire allowance, a crisp ten-dollar bill, on the exact center of the carpet. Then Mr. Rawlings sat back, into the bemused distance of his chair, and watched as Harrison, Jr., went over, bent down, and picked it up.

Coming back into the circle of Newtonian steelies, sitting down Indian-style, Dawes could see Ratshit's face was bright red, glassy and stoned over. But soon even that passed because it was a football afternoon, the Evashevski era, and because everything was filtering into the grander design of stealing the car. Around twelve-thirty the Country Club set began coming past, and drifting in. They stopped in small, select caravans of Cadillacs, Lincolns and an occasional Mercedes convertible. There was a quiet parade of tasteful straw baskets with neatly checkered cloths, tweed coats and sleeveless V-necked sweaters, brown wing tips and an occasional lawyer's pipe. Silver flasks flashed in the Midwestern sun. The sun sank beyond noon, the fighting Hawkeyes had already kicked off, and everyone who was fourteen wished suddenly that the whole world would get its ass on the road.

. . . .

But Dawes Williams thought Ratshit's mother, who was sitting in a chair near the window, who was obviously not leaving for anywhere at the moment, was one of the most striking older women he'd ever seen. The dense fall light fell through her premature platinum hair. Dawes remembered talking to her one Saturday about Martin Luther. He had sat back, judg­ing her ideas about Martin Luther, becoming the real snob in the piece by deciding she was really quite intelligent, but in the middle she had destroyed the whole mood anyway by pausing and intoning:

"Dawes, you sound like such a nice, reasonable boy. Is there any way you could...that is, is there any way you could use your influence to see that Harrison is not called Rat's...Rat's shit any more do you suppose?"

Dawes Williams promised he would try his best, but nothing had come of it.

Later, after stealing the car and making long circles through the town and returning, reparking the whole thing on its chalk marks in the driveway long after the Rawlingses had left, they sat in the kitchen and drank straight warm bourbon from wine glasses and tried not to wince. Travis and Dunker took theirs down in two large gulps and then looked out of the window for a long time. When they looked back, their eyes were still slightly flushed. They all drank two apiece and sat on the kitchen floor talking in the late, drifting shadows. Dawes Williams said:

"By God, I think I'm drunk," and they all began laughing, and looking at each other closely as if they were supposed to see something they had never seen before. The early fall evening began wafting the walls of Mrs. Rawlings' kitchen without even a voice. The Rawlingses would be home soon. It was time to roll the underground up and call it a day. They got up and headed for the porch. They hung around for awhile and said goodby to Ratshit. Travis turned the other way. Eddie, Dunker and Dawes walked to the corner. They turned. The pale light grayed in the bare trees, drifted off like a boat in the cold autumn limbs. Travis was already down the block.

"Hey, Travis," they said, "we'll be seeing ya."

"That's right, you will," he said, turning. "Damn right. I'll be seeing ya. And don't let your meat loaf," he called after them down the quiet street.

It had been a good day, a day already slipping into memory, gone down the long edges of boulevards full as houses with dark elm and white cedar.

"What's up tonight?" Dunker was saying.

"I'm taking Georgia down by the hedges on Ben Franklin Field and wrestlin' her for it," Eddie said.

"Wrestle her for what?" Dawes Williams said, turning off, calling behind himself, moving up the hill for home, drunk on the air.