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.

Stoner by Williams

Julian Barnes recommended Stoner in a piece in the Guardian as the "must read book of 2013."  This novel by John Williams (who?) was first published in 1965 and was a candidate for disappearance until it became a success in France in a translation by Anna Gavalda.  Barnes gives an account of the book's second life as an international phenomenon.

The day before yesterday, I started reading Stoner.  I'm only a hundred pages in (a third of the way into the book), and my impression is that William Stoner, the titular character, has led an isolated life.  The University which was his escape from farm life became another trap or asylum.  Up to this point in the book, I've seen very little of Stoner's life in the academy.  Perhaps English department politics will become the subject of the latter part of the book?  Stoner's marriage to Edith is tragic.  He's a modern man though, or before his time — he takes responsibility for the care and rearing of his daughter while Edith suffers from an illness which looks to me like depression.