Stoner

I wrote about John Williams' masterpiece Stoner just a month or so after I began this blog. I had this to say about it:

I read Stoner this summer and was immediately convinced that it’s one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. Williams’ quiet, spare prose about the life of an unremarkable man who teaches English at a university does not seem to be the stuff of great novels. I tried explaining the storyline to a friend of mine, who scoffed at my description – not for him, thanks. The problem is that a mere outline of the story is utterly insufficient as a description of the book. All I can say is, read it. The cumulative effect of Williams’ storytelling is powerfully moving and, in the end, heartbreaking. It is a tragedy but one with ameliorative effects. One gets the sense that Williams’ point is that we all live tragic lives, or at least lives that will be visited by tragedy. It’s how we handle those tragedies, how we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, that matters. In the end, we’ll find a way of understanding the disappointments, we’ll throw bitterness and self-pity off, and we’ll find a sense of, perhaps not peace, or even contentment, but acceptance.

In a post at Commentary Magazine literary blog today, D. G. Myers has a much longer (and better) discussion of the book. His take on it is similar to my own:

Stoner takes an outwardly nondescript life, the sort of life that many of us want to escape into fiction, and demonstrates that the real drama of human experience is in the daily refusal to escape, the uninterrupted renunciation of extreme situations, the muted decision to stay and do some good. It’s hard to make such a book sound very exciting. That Stoner is exciting — unexpectedly so, and incredibly moving — is the true measure of Williams’s achievement.

Stoner is a deeply moving book (as is Williams' follow-up to it, Augustus, which I discuss in greater detail in the post linked above) and Myers' discussion of it gets very close to the heart of why. He sums up by saying, "[Stoner] will remind you why you first started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people’s lives. And perhaps that is the final cause of all good fiction." Read the entire discussion, and if you like great fiction, read Stoner. It was one of the most illuminating literary experiences of my reading life.