The Harvard Square Book Circle

The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, discusses JOHN WILLIAMS's first novel, Nothing but the Night.

About Nothing but the Night

By the author of Stoner, Nothing but the Night is a searing look at a man's relationship with his absent father, and how early trauma manifests throughout one's life. In this 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.