Review: Stoner by John Williams
On paper, Stoner sounds like the least exciting novel ever written. A farm boy goes to university, becomes an English professor, has a difficult marriage and a stalled career, and dies. The first paragraph tells you as much. And yet I read it in two sittings and spent the following week thinking about little else.
What Williams understands is that most lives are not dramatic, but almost all of them are full. William Stoner's great love is not a person but a subject: the moment in a sophomore survey course when a sonnet suddenly opens up in front of him is one of the best descriptions of falling for literature I've read.
What stays with me
The prose is plain and exact, with almost no ornament. That restraint is what makes the few moments of feeling land so hard. There's a scene late in the book with his daughter that I had to put the book down for.
It isn't a cheerful read, exactly. But it is a kind one, and it made me want to be more attentive to the small, steady things in my own days.
Who it's for: anyone who has ever loved a subject more than was strictly sensible.