Name: maariyah 's review of Nothing But the Night by John Williams
Item: Nothing But the Night
Rating: 2.5
Author: maariyah

John Williams

First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist--a career that would go on to include the classics Stoner and the National Book Award winning Augustus. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature tat the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years. With rare economy and clarity, the story moves at an ever-increasing pace to its unforgettable end.

Nothing But the Night

shen

Arthur Maxley is a tense and listless young man. One day he receives a letter from his long-estranged father. Arthur's fear and aversion to the man is powerful, yet his compulsion to see his father is irresistible. After their meeting, Arthur is propelled into a night of drinking and spontaneous intimacy with a beautiful young woman. But as the memories of childhood trauma surface and disorientate, Arthur's night out rises towards the pitch of disaster.

maariyah 

Jeremy Boyd

Katrina Wilson

Stoner author John Williams's first novel is a searing look at a man's relationship with his absent father, and how early trauma manifests throughout one's life John Williams's first novel is a brooding psychological noir. Arthur Maxley is a young man at the end of his emotional rope. Having dropped out of college, he's holed up in a big-city hotel, living off an allowance from his family, feeling nothing but alone and doing nothing but drinking to forget it. What's brought him to this point? Something is troubling him, something is haunting him, something he cannot bring himself either to face or to turn away from. And now his father has come to town, a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy. They've been estranged for years, and yet Arthur wants to meet--and so he does, reeling away from the encounter for a night of drinking and dancing and a final reckoning with the traumatizing past that readers will not soon forget. This edition of Nothing but the Night includes an interview with Nancy Gardner Williams, the author's widow.

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Nothing But the Night by John Williams

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Nothing But the Night by John Williams