Nothing But the Night

Arthur Maxley is young, tense and adrift. A letter from his estranged father unsettles the fragile order of his day, drawing him toward a meeting he both fears and cannot refuse. After lunch, a charged dinner and a night of drinking, Arthur drifts into a nightclub and then into the company of Claire Hegsic. What begins as the possibility of intimacy becomes overtaken by old terror. Fragmented memories of childhood trauma surface with terrible force, and the night rises toward violence, humiliation and isolation. Nothing But the Night , John Williams’s first novel, is a feverish psychological study of alienation, memory, family damage and a mind under pressure. For readers who love Stoner or want short literary fiction with noirish atmosphere and tragic intensity, it reveals the early sharpness of a writer already attuned to loneliness.

Arthur Maxley is young, tense and adrift. A letter from his estranged father unsettles the fragile order of his day, drawing him toward a meeting he both fears and cannot refuse. After lunch, a charged dinner and a night of drinking, Arthur drifts into a nightclub and then into the company of Claire Hegsic. What begins as the possibility of intimacy becomes overtaken by old terror. Fragmented memories of childhood trauma surface with terrible force, and the night rises toward violence, humiliation and isolation. Nothing But the Night , John Williams’s first novel, is a feverish psychological study of alienation, memory, family damage and a mind under pressure. For readers who love Stoner or want short literary fiction with noirish atmosphere and tragic intensity, it reveals the early sharpness of a writer already attuned to loneliness.

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.