Nothing but the Night by John Williams (Alan Swallow, 1948)
SPOILERS. William’s (Stoner) first book, published by Alan Swallow in Denver in 1948. A very young man’s book in which the drama is exaggerated and the structure manipulated (withheld information) to create unnecessary suspense. Yet beneath this unfortunately labored and heightened surface is some very nice writing and some beautifully captured moments of a day in the life of Arthur Maxley, a young man adrift in an unnamed city on the brink of collapse (him, not the city). As a child he witnessed the violent and gruesome suicide of his mother (gun in mouth) from which he has never recovered. This back story is teasingly revealed through inelegantly inserted flashbacks, during the course of a day in which Arthur meets a homosexual friend for lunch and his estranged father for dinner, followed by a drunken and ultimately darkly (literally and figuratively) violent encounter with an equally damaged young woman. Tedious, but interesting to read the young Williams groping his way towards the brilliance of Stoner.
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