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In The Stones of Summer, author Dow Mossman gives us a rare tour through the dark-pit life of an adolescent schizophrenic—a strange and mysterious world that is off-limits for most people and visited only briefly even by psychoanalysts.
Reading this humorous and poetic autobiographical novel is like getting to know a schizophrenic patient on a personal level. Dawes
Williams, the protagonist, allows us a glimpse into the psychotic core that threatens us all if our defenses ever fail (Eigen, 1986, p. 7). For psychoanalysts, it provides a look at the sensitive and creative potential not restrained by superego/social constraints, but buried within the mysterious turmoil and chaos of an unconscious arena. If we have the courage and honesty to be open to that mad-other, we will perceive bits and pieces of our own lives.
It is not too much, I believe, to compare “Stones” to Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust, however, cruises over the lovely undulating surface of life, while Mossman plunges into the mad depths. Proust spent time in a mental hospital after the death of his mother. Mossman, too, coped with the death of his mother, after nursing her at home for four years. Madness is, perhaps, partly an attempt to retain the mother—child world—that place of pure love and absolute connection. We want not so much the repeated experience as the conviction that it is there. This hunger can be felt throughout Stones.
Mossman wrote this novel as a young man, while he was in the famous Iowa University Writers' Workshop MFA program. It was first published to glowing reviews in 1972. John Seelye, then writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Mossman a “truthteller” and his work a “holy book” diat “burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon-fire, stone fire.”
Despite initial good reviews, the book attracted little following. Now there is new attention, with the production in 2003 of a two-hour documentary film about the book called Stone Reader, and repub