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.
