The Stones of Summer
Dow Mossman
Language: English
Pages: 604
ISBN: 1585675172
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Dawes Williams is not just an ordinary boy growing up in the culture-void Iowa corn country. He is a little bit of a poet, a little bit of a genius -- and a little bit mad. At six he already understands more about life than the tough grandfather whom he idolizes. At eighteen he has been irrevocably labeled as the town eccentric, although he manages to stave off his bizarre inclinations and to make it, more or less, as one of the guys. But at twenty-one his threatening dark impulses start to surge to the surface and his battle for sanity and survival begins in earnest.
Dow Mossman is one of those rare writers whose prose reads like poetry and whose images electrify even the most jaded reader. His novel achieves the blending of several genres; it is at the same time romantic, lyric, and regional in the finest sense of the words. Although the entire novel spans three decades, it is essentially centered on the experience of growing up on the midwestern prairies in the fifties, and it captures with breathtaking artistry a feeling for the land, for the people, and for the myth of that era.
Mossman's gifts as a writer are extraordinary, and those who can endure the beauty and the pain of The Stones of Summer will be stunned, for it reveals the very soul of an artist.
business here, but I wouldn’t want to bore your mother.” “The damage has already been done,” she said. “Yes, well, this town of yours gets me to feeling that way.” In the dark the land was a perfect sill to look over. He sat listening to his sound, their noise turn to stones, rain, drifting the roads into fields. “Go on then,” she said, smiling at Simpson. “Be an ass.” “Well, then,” he said quietly, “think I will. It’s all based on the great idea, like poetry I guess, that a lost town is better
neighborhood. Crown, whose father’s pants were fourth deputy sheriff of Thomas County, Iowa; Crown, whose mother owned a huge yellow shell of a nursing home, full to the walls of peacefully rotting bodies and who, himself, therefore, he thought, seemed always nervous, about to run off somewhere unnamed at any moment, and who smelled always like a dark spiral of old flesh, the well of a staircase, himself. In fact, Dawes could still see him moving down those rotting stairs, pausing only to spit
porch. They were away and not listening, but he could see Grandma-great didn’t mind; she knew about the others, and the only one she had left to be curious about was Dawes Williams. She had great faith in curiosity, and she was incredibly old. Dawes had never seen anything that old before. In Ronnie Crown’s nursing home the people were that old, but you didn’t look at them; you looked instead at the walls beyond. Crown looked at them. Crown cursed at them, and laughed, and moved through the
the windows now. Finally, they would shine STONES_BOOK_O1B.QXD 12 9/17/03 3:52 PM Page 12 DOW MOSSMAN matchlight at the old man, at Dunchee, from the dusty and reflectionless windows. They would move it about in the dim interior cracks, the walls of thin wood, until he would finally see it and begin picking his listing way up his driveway, waving his cane, threatening lawsuits, and they would begin retreating again, exploding with laughter, down the back of the trellis and over the brick
and he was free, almost feeling good about it all, when he looked suddenly into Gin’s tremendous eyes and he thought he could hear her saying: “I’d rather have a grandson of mine dead, six foot under and buried, than ever once in his lifetime hear him talk to his grandfather like that. Do you hear me, Dawes? Six foot under and gone,” she said. And for a moment her voice was a radio, something real and present and horrible working within the lines and tight veins roping her face. She had turned on