This philosophy of nihilism leaves Dawes with a choice: he can either commit suicide, thus rejecting a meaningless life, or he can as Todd Andrews did in John Barth's The Floating Opera, conclude that he might as well live on because suicide is also meaningless.

All of Dawes's life seems to point towards the second conclusion. But then. Dawes is dead in the end we are left in doubt as to whether it is (1) the result of his family's genetic history; (2) the conscious result of Dawes' death-wish reinforcing the suicide angle; or (3) an accident of fate, the result of Dawes' own personal history.

We are, at different points in the novel, informed that there is an inheritable disease in the Williams family, and that Dawes has only sixteen months to live. But Dawes seems to die of an eye infection, which he may have purposely tried to receive, and then neglected. The final question remains does he accept death because he wills it or because it's immediately inevitable?

We never really find out Mossman has purposely left the resolution in a haze of perpetual speculation. We can only guess why he has left the denouement in need of another. Perhaps because he sees in Dawes's death a firmer resolution. More likely, because a great deal of his material is taken from his own life. Dawes Oldham Williams is Dow. But to continue Dawes's life in conjunction with the life of Mossman would only lead to the writing of a novel and not death. So Dawes finds life in Dow Mossman, to a point. This point of departure is Mossman's own philosophical confusion. Because, if he firmly believes in nihilism, he must make the choice between suicide and absurdism himself. He obviously can't.

THAT THAT MAY HAVE been another serious limitation of The Stones of Summer has been more carefully considered by Mossman. Many first novels are drawn from the author's past experiences. If not treated with restraint, this kind of writing can become a kind of self-purgation, ending in emptiness of vision and loss of imagination.

But Dow Mossman hasn't used restraint, and his poetic recklessness has produced a strong first novel nonetheless. He deserves comparison with the best novelists of the first half of this century, and he has the potential to become one of the best novelists of the second half.