Nothing But the Night by John Williams Review

A young man is traumatised by what he saw his parents do one night when he was ickle. Oh you, it wasn’t THAT, they weren’t “hugging” in a special way! But what was it? The mystery slowly unravels in Nothing but the Night...

Eh - not as good as Stoner. John Williams’ first book is a quick read and not just because it’s a novella but because Williams was a good writer right out the gate and his prose is very smooth and accessible. The quality of the writing, the pacing and some of the scenes, particularly the key scene where we see what happened between his mum and dad, were ok.

But there’s barely anything here to hold the attention - a traumatised dude does not get up to much beyond going stir crazy in his apartment! He meets a leech of a friend who begs for money, he has an awkward lunch with his dad and then goes on a disastrous drunken night out - it just wasn’t enough for me.

In this New York Review of Books edition, there’s an interview included at the back with Williams’ widow, Nancy, who reveals that he wrote this short book at just 22 years old while serving in the Air Force during WW2 (this was the only way he could go to university - to have the government pay his way in exchange for service in the war); an impressive fact alone. He had been shot down on a mission over Burma and he was one of the three survivors from the crash - the other five men died.

He wrote the book out of boredom as there was nothing else to do in the area he was convalescing. But I wonder if the trauma the main character experiences in several rambling scenes, many hallucinated, was Williams subconsciously working through the trauma he experienced during the war - dealing with being surrounded by so much death?

The interview is informative in many regards, not least as I found out Williams became an alcoholic in his final years, his wife intimating that the memories of the war were harder for him to deal with towards the end. In that sense, perhaps this book is an accurate and illuminating portrayal of what it’s like to live with trauma? I’m lucky enough not to know but, even if it is, it didn’t make for compelling reading. I found those sequences - the ones where he imagines himself floating - overly literary, like what a young writer might think they’re supposed to write to be taken seriously, dull, and pretentious more than anything.

Ultimately Nothing but the Night was too slight for my taste. Nowt much happens, it doesn’t really have anything to say, barring a couple scenes it’s mostly forgettable, and if it weren’t written by the author of Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus, I doubt we’d be seeing a reprinting. Fans only then, and for new readers interested in this author, I’d rec Stoner over this one.