For those of you who religiously monitor my reading list, you'll note that I've just finished a book called The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman. It was published in 1972 to rave reviews, before quickly going out of print. Recently, it was rescued from obscurity by a filmmaker named Mark Moskowitz, whose documentary, Stone Reader, chronicled his quest to find Dow Mossman. Dow seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, you see, and Stones was his only book. So Mark crosses the country several times over, looking for clues and tracking down Dow's old professors at the Iowa Writers Workshop, all so he can sit down and talk to the author about his book. Although Mark's quest may seem a little bit like stalking—more than a little, at times—I'll tell you now that my own fascination with the book probably rivals his. (Unfortunately, now that Mark's already done it, I can't just go and make a documentary as an excuse to talk to Dow. But whatever.) I loved this book. I savored it from page one all the way to page 581. Yes, it's a long one, but well worth your time.

The book is divided into sections, and it follows Dawes Williams through three periods of his life. The first section shows Dawes as a boy growing up in Iowa. He's extremely bright, and already he's got some strange attitudes about the world. He speaks in analytical, poetic gusts that completely confound everyone but his best friend, with whom he gets in trouble repeatedly. In the second section, he's 18 years old and doing a lot of drinking and driving (it's rural Iowa, and there's not much else to do apparently). At this point, we see Dawes diverging from reality more and more, drifting into crazy and eloquent monologues prompted by nothing more than the innocent comments of friends. The third section finds Dawes in his mid-20s. He's pretty much off the deep end by now, spending his time carousing and getting in fights in Mexico. His best friend writes him letters from Vietnam, the only place where the madness and chaos equal what's occurring in Dawes' brain. In fact, his personal insanity seems to be not so much a pre-existing condition as the result of being infected by the insanity of the world.

In case the madness thing tipped you off. . . yes, there's quite a Hamlet thing going on. In fact, the whole book is one big "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Why are we here? What is the purpose of everything? And Dawes' secondary personality (which takes over in the final section) is named Seriphus Handsaw Dawes Williams, with "handsaw" as a reference to that line from the play, "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." Shakespeare was also pretty big on death, and this book contains the third best description of dying I've ever read, just after One Hundred Years of Solitude (by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Black Water (by Joyce Carol Oates). None of us has a clue whether it's accurate, of course, but watching the mind of Dawes Williams gradually wind down to its inevitable end, you just get a feeling that it's right, that it's got to be exactly like that. (Sorry about the spoiler, but it's not much of a secret once you start reading.)

Now's the part where I tell you that, of everyone I know who has read it, I am the only one who enjoyed this book at all. Most of them didn't make it through the first hundred pages. I was bewitched from the first, and I'm guessing that if it's not like that for you—if you don't love it right away—then you probably won't want to waste your time. The reason I fell into this book's gravitational pull was the author's seemingly endless capacity for imagery. You will never read such evocative language, so deft and slippery that, admittedly, you may have to focus all your energy to know what's going on. It's kind of like Faulkner in that way, except with better punctuation. This is what bogs people down I'd guess. You can't just tear through Stones as if it were any other book. There are no straightforward Hemingway phrases; there are only long-winded disquisitions on existence. So it does require a modicum of patience, but my God is it worth it in the end. Recently, I told a friend that this is one of those books I would want with me if I were stranded on a desert island. You could spend a thousand years meditating on it, just letting yourself get carried away by each image and metaphor, and still have more to think about by the end. These are not the kind of metaphors that you relate to; they're the kind you inhabit and get lost in. And they're not even strictly logical. Like everything else in the book, they're tinged with madness. Here's the first sentence of the book:

"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 water, halving with blood."

Dream is right. This is the kind of dream you don't want to wake up from. Highly recommended.

By the way, if anyone else out there has read Stones, let me know. Even if I can't stalk Dow Mossman myself, I'd settle for talking to someone else who's read (and liked!) his book. :)