Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely HORRIBLE - A Lesson in Myth-Making
Review: This book had the build-up of THE STONE READER documentary. The film was quite good and left many a viewer waiting for THE STONES OF SUMMER to be released by B&N Books. What a joke. I honestly have to question the motives of the filmmaker and the publishing house as they set out to build the book into a modern day "publishing miracle." They definitely succeeded in bringing this "literary masterpiece" back to print. Unfortunately.THE STONES OF SUMMER re-defines the term, "gratuitous" when used to label an over-the-top piece of art in sexual content, violence, or profanity. Oh, the profanity. I am no prude, far from it, but this book uses the *harshest* of words on nearly EVERY PAGE of this 568 page tome. It is completely ridiculous, and why John Seelye of the NYT wrote this was a "classic" back in 1972, I'll never know. The book was a flop - despite his review. Now, it's been re-issued after the successful award-winning run of the "Stone Reader" documentary, and I hope, for the sake of TRULY great writing that never made it to print - that it flops again. A bitter disappointment. A horrible book.
Rating:
Summary: A bitter disappointment
Review: I can't remember a book I had looked forward to more than Stones of Summer. Nor can I remember a bigger disappointment. The novel reads is a dated, ungodly mess that never justifies its excessive length. I dare anyone to read all the way to the end.
Rating: 
Summary: A big, rewarding book
Review: For anyone of a certain age, I suggest you stay with this book and go along for a trip back to a time you may remember fondly or not so fondly. There is something hypnotic about this book. You can see glimpses of brilliance that are almost amazing.
Rating:
Summary: A Wild Ride
Review: The Stones of Summer is a brilliant novel. The first part of the book is 162 pages of stunning prose poetry that transported me back to my childhood. It describes a young boy's, Dawes Williams, visit to his grandparent's house with all of the mystery I remember upon entering the world of adults apart from your parents for the first time. Every word has meaning though some my find it too dense and difficult. The second part of the book is written in a radically different style - simple storytelling similar to Stand by Me or Stop-Time - as Dawes experiences his teenage years. The third part of the book takes place during the tumultous 60s in what can only be described as a wild ride that contains one of the most amazing predictions ever to come true. Dawes takes a very 60's trip "Under the Volcano" as he searches for meaning. I haven't had this much pleasure from a book in 20 years. It takes some work but the rewards are worth very bit of it.
Rating:
Summary: It's Back! If you like it, you love it!
Review: Aaaatttssssss Dawes! This book was passed around my college dorm
until it fell apart like in the movie. Now that it's back, I re-read it to see who changed more, me or it. It not only holds up, it's more amazing than I remembered. It is a profound work, because it takes you in and out of your own experiences and sends you back to your own memories. Mossman's world, once you get into it, can envelope you for some time. In a good way. It stays with you. When I was 22 I loved his rebellious nature, now I see that it is quite a mythical structure Mossman builds. Today, they might break a book like this up into a trilogy--that seems to be the trend. But it is one complete story start to finish with leaps of imagination. Part 3 which is still way-out there, also now seems very here-and-now, which speaks to how the book was probably ahead of its time back then. A very funny, sensitive, and almost tragic work. If you like this novel, you love it I think. Amazing it disappeared for so long.
Rating:
Summary: Over-rated
Review: I saw a documentary on Stones of Summer in Boston and was eager to see if the novel really lived up to the hype. The answer is NO! This book is slooooooooow and in love with itself and needs some real serious editing. It picked up a little after the first 100 extremely dull pages, but not enough to get me thru the next 500!
Rating: 
Summary: Can't get past word choices
Review: Okay...I have not been able to finish this book. Some of the author's choices of words are somewhat suspect. In the very first paragraph, he claims that "the conversations inside the car were like great wood eyes". How in the sweet Spanish Jesus can a conversation be like a great wood eye? This edition should come with a sheet of LSD, then maybe I could begin to grasp some of the concepts. The only reason I haven't given it one star is because I haven't finished it. Ever hopeful am I...My hope is like a great wall of onyx-like chess pieces. Oh God, it's contagious!
Rating:
Summary: Don't quit your day job, Mr. Mossman
Review: Before I begin, let me dispel two misconceptions I've spotted in previous reviews of this book. 1. Stones of Summer is in the tradition of James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. I suppose if you took Stones of Summer, Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow, then flipped through all three very quickly while reading snippets here and there, you'd mistakenly detect cosmetic similarities. These are illusions. While the latter two masterworks are meticulously structured (check the annotations if you don't believe me), Summer has no structure at all. Rather, it is three short stories' worth of material padded out to 580 pages by a prose style that desperately aspires (and fails) to capture the music of Joyce's and Pynchon's symphonic wordplay. From the forced opening similes to the monotonous recurring imagery of stones, blood, moons, and falling timbers, reading Mossman is like listening to an orchestra rumble franticly through the notes of the lower register, only occasionally daring to attempt a high note or a chord change. 2. Dow Mossman was ahead of his time. No, Mossman was all too depressingly OF his time, and is now very much behind the times. The book's third section especially exemplifies the self-indulgent noodling that was the fashion in postmodern literature of the late 60's/early 70's, when this book was written. In light of the literary shifts of the last thirty years, Stones of Summer will seem downright quaint to most readers. As for the book itself, it is packed with grad student indulgences from the get-go. The first section, for example, covers Dawes Williams' summers spent on his grandfather's farm. The chapters are rife with half-hearted Faulknerian pretensions, from Dawes's gnarled family history to the deranged chicken lady's American Gothic lifestyle. Along the way, Mossman consistently confuses repetitive verbal tics (Atttttts Dawes, Suure, Aw Criminy, etc.) with colorful characterization. Then there's precious little Ronnie Crown, an evil vindictive delinquent who'd destroy you for even the smallest slight and speaks in the dadaist swearing jags of an 80's action movie. The only reason you put up with it all is the hope that it will improve. It doesn't. By the time Dawes' adolescence rolls around, Mossman has abandoned the Faulknerisms in favor of bad Kerouac. Section Two feels like a long, hot drive across Iowa trapped in a car full of drunken imbeciles. Even worse, the author stacks the deck in their favor by giving the parents and authority figures less presence than those off-screen muted trumpets in a Peanuts cartoon. He also, in the manner of certain Adam Sandler comedies, tries to pass his moronic protagonists off as clever by making every victim of their cruel pranks stupider than they are. It's unfortunately short-sighted that Mossman never delves into the latent homoerotic nature of their friendship. When they humiliate an ugly girl in front of her parents, you wish she'd just step up and echo the heroine of Y Tu Mama Tambien, "All you do is talk talk talk about sex when all you really want to do is **** each other!" But of course, nobody is allowed to behave with any wit or intelligence, and so the boys get plastered every chapter, fight, and destroy property without a single person trying to impede them. SPOILER ALERT: When these jerks meet their end in a car crash into the Mississippi, you'll be cheering. Natural selection wins again. Ultimately, Dawes and friends are not the spirited youths Mossman paints them out to be, but self-destructive crypto-fascists who beat each other up whenever a thought more complex than "God, I'm drunk" is expressed. For a drinking game, I suggest taking a shot every time THAT particular statement is trotted out and treated as some vibrant life-affirming profundity. You'll be dead long before you reach the third section. Trust me, you'll be better off. The third section, as I've said, embraces everything that was bad about postmodern literature, most notably the self-indulgent "experimental" style and the "I give up" attitude towards one's relationship with the world. The book loses what little focus it still has and stops more than it ends. The only reason this jumble of undisciplined wanking gets two stars from me is there are occasional flashes of brilliant description and insightful human moments before they are quickly buried in pretentious doggerel. Overall, these rare pearls feel accidental, much as anyone can hit a piñata if given enough swings. The author could've written three good short stories. Instead, he wrote one bad novel. Especially horrifying is that Mossman is a graduate of my own alma mater, the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Apparently he didn't get his hand slapped by Frank Conroy enough because his work lacks the three cornerstones of that writing program: Meaning, Sense, and Clarity. The book is pointless, its structure arbitrary, and its descriptive style vacillates between muddy and completely opaque (especially during the more chaotic narrative events). It's no surprise that Dow Mossman has never written anything else, since he clearly had nothing beyond a few anecdotes from his own life to begin with. What is surprising--no, mind-boggling--is why Mark Moskowitz even considered this junk worth rescuing from the ash heap of failed literature where it belonged. Instead of feeling amazed or enlightened or even exhilarated by Stones of Summer, readers and hopeful writers will be depressed by this pathetic, thinly disguised autobiography of a dull man who had nothing to say and far too much time to say it.
Rating:
Summary: Wildly meandering, progressively incoherent story
Review: Bought this book for a very long plane flight, excited to discover what prompted the comment placed prominently on the cover that it "burns with a byzantine fire". After a struggle of over ten months I finally finished the sprawling and increasingly incoherent story and must admit I'm mystified. Entire paragraphs were completely incomprehensible, with mixed metaphors and comparisons meant to paint a portrait of images and feelings that left me without even a murky idea of what was intended by them. Certainly not worth the time to read, or the $14 I paid for it (which, frankly, is the only reason I felt compelled to finish it). I dislike saying anything so negative, but I'd like to save someone else the pain of feeling invested in finishing over 500 pages of this mess.
Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable and Unforgettable Book
Review: 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 write 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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