Stoner

Uncluttered.  That was the word that seemed best to sum up my sense of being in William Stoner’s world.  John Williams’ novel is uncluttered.  Nothing appears in the pages that is extraneous.  No digressions, no excursions.  Just the bare, hard story of a man, alone and melancholy.  Williams has written the biography of a man from his early days laboring on a farm to his painful death of cancer after a forty year career of teaching English composition and literature at the University of Missouri (misery?).  I suspect that something in all that reading that Stoner did prepared him to face death courageously, even stoically.  He doesn’t rush off to war, preferring to stay put during World War I in the safe environs of the University even as his friend, David Masters, the brilliant mind, meets his death on a battlefield in France.  What is most remarkable about Stoner, the man, is his ability to accept and adapt to the conditions imposed on him.  He never broke.