And while it’s hard to imagine the book standing on its own, without the reputation of Stoner, there are many moments of compelling existential reckoning buoyed by good writing. There’s certainly a lot here for Williams super fans: brief clips of lush description overlap with the protagonist’s battle with solitude and stagnation, a trope of the writer’s mature work. One clear value of reading Nothing but the Night is the same as reading any great writer’s early work: there’s a pleasure in noticing bits and pieces of the nascent style and ideas they’d eventually hone.
But now, over a decade into the author’s revival, the book is being republished this month by NYRB Classics. First published in 1948 and written a few years before, the novel has received little attention, and Williams would eventually distance himself from it.
Together, the trio has proved Williams to be a masterful blender of genre fiction and literary consciousness, an essential American writer who almost went forgotten.Īnd then there’s Nothing but the Night. It’s reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and spawned almost as many fawning appreciations a Williams biography published last year is titled The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life.Īnd while Stoner is well deserving of the praise and acclaim, perhaps the best side effect of its success has been a new appreciation of Williams’ other work, notably the 1960 western Butcher’s Crossing and 1972’s Augustus, an epistolary historical novel which won the National Book Award. Williams died in 1992 relatively unknown, but has become famous over the past decade since the revival of his 1965 campus novel Stoner. What do we do with the first novels of authors who later prove themselves to be brilliant? And what if that realization doesn’t come until long after their death? Certainly one curse of posthumous success is that false starts, early experiments and practice shots run the risk of getting dredged up and packaged nicely with a new introduction, or in the case of John Williams’ inconsistent Nothing but the Night, an interview with the author’s widow.
0 kommentar(er)
