The Hair of Harold Roux
by Thomas Williams
Summary
Aaron Benham is a literature professor at a New Hampshire college, on leave to write a novel and not writing it. Across one long weekend in the spring of 1970 the phone keeps going: the mother of a student who has vanished, the wife of a colleague who is about to lose his job over an unfinished dissertation, and then the discovery that he has forgotten his wife's parents' wedding anniversary and that she and the children have driven to the party without him. Aaron is clinically depressed, knows it, and still rides his motorcycle to the edge of what the gravel will hold.
The novel Aaron cannot finish is also called The Hair of Harold Roux, and Williams gives us long stretches of it. In it Allard Benson, an Army veteran back at college once the war is over, takes up with Harold Roux, a failed seminarian who went bald young and wears a toupee he believes nobody has noticed. Allard promises to marry Mary while sleeping with her roommate Naomi, a bully named Boom Maloumian runs the dormitory on fear, and the whole thing ends at a student party in the miniature Lilliputian tourist village where Harold has taken a caretaker's job, in a fistfight where Allard accidentally pulls the hairpiece off the one man who trusted him. A third strand, the fairy tale Aaron once told his children at bedtime, runs underneath it all.
Around 370 pages, and it crosses between its three levels without announcement, so the opening asks for patience before the pattern comes clear. What it is finally about is a man using invention to keep clear of his own conduct. Readers should know that the college sections include rape and casual cruelty, written without excuse and hard going.
Best for readers who like a novel about writing a novel, and who want the mirrors to cost the narrator something.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1975 National Book Award for Fiction went to two books, and the National Book Foundation still records both as winners: Williams's novel and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Williams spent most of his career teaching at the University of New Hampshire, where John Irving studied under him and later credited Williams and John Yount with turning his sophomore year around. He published eight novels in his lifetime and died of lung cancer in 1990 at 63.
The award did nothing for the book's survival. It went out of print and stayed out of print until Bloomsbury USA reissued it in 2011 with an introduction by Andre Dubus III and an afterword by the author's daughter, the novelist Ann Joslin Williams, and that edition drew a fresh round of favorable reviews. Its most persistent champion is Stephen King, who dedicated his 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes to Williams and has named this novel one of the books he goes back to.