stoner book review guardian

Stoner by John Williams – review

I n 1965 a brief, favourable review of Stoner , a novel by an English professor called John Williams, ran in the New Yorker . The book was described as "a masterly portrait … of the life of an ordinary, almost an invisible, man". Before long, Williams himself was invisible; Stoner received no further coverage and was out of print within a year, and despite wider critical approval his later novel Augustus failed to find much of an audience. But rather than disappearing altogether, Stoner is now being heralded by some as a lost classic, and since its initial republication a few years ago has been enjoying an unlikely second act, even becoming a breakout hit in the Netherlands.

Perhaps the novel's unremarkable subject matter was out of step with the upheavals of its time; certainly its restrained, delicate brand of realism was out of fashion. But then it is a strange novel to provoke raucous applause in any age. It tells the life story of an unassuming literary scholar called William Stoner. Williams makes a point of his very ordinariness on the first page – Stoner was "held in no particular esteem when he was alive", and "few students remembered him with any sharpness". But his ordinary life is treated with bracing sincerity, and an enraptured state of attention.

The hushed dysfunction of Stoner's marriage, the furtive joys of an affair, the struggles of his fragile, wayward child – rarely has the intimate detail of a life been drawn with such emotional clarity. Most affecting is the portrayal of the disintegration of Stoner's mind in his final days, but even passing details are freighted with melancholy: the trees that "trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous", "the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms", the leaves that "rustled and turned, ghost-like in the darkness". Williams renders an invisible life lustrous in all its quotidian triumphs and tragedies; his novel deserves similar illumination.

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The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of

In one of those few gratifying instances of belated artistic justice, John Williams’s “Stoner” has become an unexpected bestseller in Europe after being translated and championed by the French writer Anna Gavalda. Once every decade or so, someone like me tries to do the same service for it in the U.S., writing an essay arguing that “Stoner” is a great, chronically underappreciated American novel. (The latest of these, which also lists several previous such essays, is Morris Dickstein’s for the Times . ) And yet it goes on being largely undiscovered in its own country, passed around and praised only among a bookish cognoscenti, and its author, John Williams, consigned to that unenviable category inhabited by such august company as Richard Yates and James Salter: the writer’s writer.

“Stoner” is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-“Gatsby.” I suspect one reason “Gatsby” is a classic is that, despite his delusions and his bad end, we all secretly think Gatsby’s pretty cool. Americans don’t really see him as an anti-hero or a tragic figure—not any more than they see the current breed of charismatic criminals on cable as villains. Gatsby’s a success story: he makes a ton of money, looks like a million bucks, owns a mansion, throws great parties, and even gets his dream girl, for a little while, at least. “Stoner” ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure. The book is set not in the city of dreams but back in the dusty heartland. It’s ostensibly an academic novel, a genre historically of interest exclusively to academics. Its values seem old-fashioned, prewar (which may be one reason it’s set a generation before it was written), holding up conscientious slogging as life’s greatest virtue and reward. And its prose, compared to Fitzgerald’s ecstatic art-nouveau lyricism, is austere, restrained, and precise; its polish is the less flashy, more enduring glow of burnished hardwood; its construction is invisibly flawless, like the kind of house they don’t know how to build anymore.

“Stoner” opens with a short prologue, describing, in terse, obit-like prose, the life and death of an unbeloved assistant professor of English at a provincial university. It mentions that the only evidence of his existence is a medieval manuscript donated to the library by his colleagues in his name. It concludes:

An occasional student who comes across the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

This is, no getting around it, a bummer. It’s also, in its unassuming way, an audacious beginning; by preëmpting the usual suspense of narrative, denying us even the promise of some cathartic tragedy, Williams forces us to wonder: What will this book be about? Its ambition is evident in the apparent humility of its subject: like Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, it’s to be nothing more or less than the story of a life. And there is something in even those first paragraphs, an un-show-off-y assurance in the prose, like the soft opening notes of a virtuoso or the first casual gestures of a master artist, that tells us we are in the presence not just of a great writer but of something more—someone who knows life, who maybe even understands it. It’s the same thing I sense in reading James Salter: the presence of wisdom. And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style.

Despite its pellucid prose, “Stoner” isn’t an easy book to read—not because it’s dense or abstruse but because it’s so painful. I had to stop reading it for a year or two, near the middle of the book, when Stoner’s wife, Edith, undertakes a deliberate but unselfconscious campaign to estrange him from his daughter, the one person he truly loves. Later on, after his daughter has been lost to him, Stoner finds real love again with a young student, his intellectual equal—and once again an enemy, seeing his happiness, sets out to take it from him. Williams contrives to forcibly deprive his hero of happiness in his marriage, his daughter, his lover, even his vocation. It all feels grindingly inevitable, like the annihilating whim of the gods in Euripides.

The book’s antagonists are its most problematic aspect; they’re essentially instruments used by the world to crush and smother anything that William Stoner loves. Two of them are even disfigured—one, Hollis Lomax, Stoner’s colleague and enemy, is a hunchback, and the other, Charles Walker, Lomax’s protégé, has a crippled arm and leg. This marking of evil with deformity strikes a twenty-first century reader as heavy-handed, not to mention un-p.c., like something out of fairy tales or “Dick Tracy.” But, unlike the villains of melodrama, these characters truly live. Stoner’s wife, Edith, isn’t a 2-D caricature; she’s been raised in an emotional vacuum, taught only useless ornamental skills, sheltered as wholly as possible from reality, and “her moral training … was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual”—effectively cultivated to become a brittle, conniving hysteric. Her cruelty is all the more hateful because she keeps herself unaware of it—she isn’t even a plain-dealing villain. And Lomax, Stoner’s great adversary in the arena of career, is a sensitive, wounded soul not unlike Stoner himself, who honestly believes it’s Stoner who’s blindly malign, bigoted against himself and his disabled favorite student.

The same revelation led Lomax and Stoner to their vocations: “the epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.” (This is, by the way, a trick the novel itself pulls off again and again, in quiet, transcendent moments that make the hair on your arms stand up for reasons you can’t name, giving you glimpses of eternity through the darkening view out an office window on a winter night.) At the end of a long evening of drinking at the Stoners’ house, spent talking mostly about Lomax’s early life and love of books, Lomax, in leaving, kisses Edith chastely on the lips—an oddly charged gesture that seems to have less to do with any attraction to his colleague’s wife than with their shared first love. It’s possible “Stoner” is doomed to be forever beloved mostly among critics, academics, and authors, because at its heart is the ineffable fetish that afflicts them all: “the love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.”

Lomax’s childhood discovery of literature is called “a kind of conversion,” and elsewhere the university is likened to a cloister, a refuge for those unfit for life in the world. But being unfit for the world is to no one’s discredit; the world outside the university is stupid and brutal; of it we hear only echoes of the World Wars and Depression. “Like the Church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God,” says Stoner’s friend Dave Masters, “we have our pretenses in order to survive.” In William Stoner’s most outwardly dramatic moment, when he refuses to pass the fraudulent Walker in his orals, he argues that it’s himself and his like who are the true cripples, confined to the safe asylum of the Academy; Walker is the world embodied, covering for his lack of even a basic factual command of his chosen field with florid rhetoric—in other words, he’s a bullshit artist. He’s a more instructive foil to Stoner than Lomax, not a rival but a kind of apostate. After writing his own book, Stoner “never thought of it, and of his authorship, without wonder and disbelief at his temerity and the responsibility he had assumed.” Literature is the true religion of “Stoner,” and it is this that ultimately redeems Stoner’s life.

The refrain of Stoner’s deathbed scene—“What did you expect?”—modulates in tone over the course of its pages from bitter disillusionment to resignation to transcendent serenity. At first, Stoner sees his own life as the world has judged it, with unforgiving clarity: “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.” But after what’s either a figment of delirium or a glimpse of grace—three laughing young couples trespassing across his lawn like ghosts, echoing the trio of friends with whom he went through school—he sees this estimation as “mean, unworthy of what his life had been.” In his last moments Stoner takes his own book—a musty treatise on the influence of Latin poetry on the Medieval lyric—from the bedside table, and as he touches its pages he feels “the old excitement that was like terror.”

The first time Stoner ever experienced this awe, as an undergraduate in an English Literature survey, moved to stillness by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “light slanted in the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from within them and go out against a dimness; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight.” As the faces of his classmates were transfigured, Stoner looked down at his own awkward farmer’s hands and saw them anew, as things strange and wonderful. Fumbling now for his own book on his deathbed, Stoner is once more struck by the miraculous working of his own fingers—both times Williams uses the word “marveled”— as if it is the Word that animates his flesh. And here again, at the end, “The sunlight, passing his window, shone upon the page, and he could not see what was written there.” For all the jewel-like beauty of its own prose, “Stoner” tells us that the words themselves are inessential; literature, like Stoner himself, is only an imperfect reflector of that light that comes from outside.

Part of “Stoner” ’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair. Stoner realizes at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them, not in some obscure scholarly Grail but in its pursuit. His life has not been squandered in mediocrity and obscurity; his undistinguished career has not been mulish labor but an act of devotion. He has been a priest of literature, and given himself as fully as he could to the thing he loved. The book’s conclusion, such as it is—I don’t know whether to call it a consolation or a warning—is that there is nothing better in this life. The line, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial,” is like the novel’s own epitaph. Its last image is of the book falling from lifeless fingers into silence.

“Revolutionary Road,” a novel similarly lauded and almost as little read, enjoyed a belated best-seller-dom with a tie-in edition coincident with Sam Mendes’s film adaptation. (Seeing all those commuters reading Yates’ pitiless novel was like watching people drink arsenic marketed as smart water.) It’s hard to imagine a movie ever being successfully made of “Stoner,” because it is so essentially about the dissonance between life as seen—shabby and ignominious, a joke or a waste—and life as experienced, shot through with shafts of love and meaning. “There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history,” says Stoner’s mentor, Archer Sloane, the man who first revealed to him the power of literature. The novel embodies the very virtues it exalts, the same virtues that probably relegate it, like its titular hero, to its perpetual place in the shade. But the book, like professor William Stoner, isn’t out to win popularity contests. It endures, illumined from within.

Tim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist. His most recent book is “We Learn Nothing.”

Photograph by Josef Koudelka/Magnum.

John Williams' Stoner is the perfect novel. This is why I read it every year

By Stan Grant

Topic: Books (Literature)

The people of John Williams novel are — like us all — to some degree unknowable to each other. ( Unsplash: Thought Catalog )

I first read the "perfect novel" a decade ago. I say the perfect novel because that's what John Williams' Stoner has been called.

When you read this it will be Boxing Day and I will be reading the novel again. That's what I do each Christmas, I re-read Stoner. What's more I make a point each year of recommending it to, or even buying a copy of it for, someone.

It resonates at Christmas. A tale of a small life not perfectly but unassumingly lived. In that simple way Stoner is life affirming.

William Stoner is the lone son of a hard scrabble farming couple. He is raised on duty and dignity. Words are spare and emotions restrained:

"It was a lonely household, of which he was an only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil. In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring at the yellow flame; often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair and the soft creak of a timber giving a little beneath the age of the house."

From a boy he attends to his chores. He rises early, he works hard. He is a good son. He does what is required of him. He does not complain. He dares not dream.

Stoner grows up and to his surprise his father suggests he go to college to study agriculture and then, armed with new knowledge, return to his family's farm. Instead Stoner falls in love with books and becomes an English professor.

When he tells his parents that he will not come back home he just so gently breaks their hearts.

A quiet novel reborn

William Stoner climbs no great heights, he leaves barely a trace as John Williams writes: "Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now."

Williams, says Stoner, speaks to us of what awaits us all.

John Williams' Stoner ( Supplied: Penguin )

Lest I spoil the book, I will say just this: the world turns around Stoner, war, hardship, love, loss and Stoner remains where and who he is.

That's all.

The word that comes to me is quiet. Stoner is a quiet novel.

Perhaps that's why it vanished with barely a trace when first released. It was published as America burned during the 1960s.

It could not have been more out of place during a time of riot and revolution, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

Then in a new century Stoner found its place. A chance review of this lost masterpiece of American letters turned it into a global bestseller.

That's when I discovered it and read it one Christmas. It spoke to me as it spoke to so many others exhausted by a world with no pause button. It was what I needed. I had spent too many years as a reporter on the front lines of a world of upheaval, violence, suffering, unending crisis from Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Asia.

The power of stoicism 

It took a toll. I read Stoner at the end of a year in which I had struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression. Life had been emptied of meaning. I felt lost. I cut myself off from people, even those closest to me.

Those who loved me helped me through. My own frailties prepared me for Stoner. I had to earn the right to read it.

William Stoner endured.

There were times reading Stoner that I wanted William to seize life, to live recklessly. I wanted him to be impulsive and selfish and put his happiness above all. But that's this age talking where we have declared happiness our right.

I wanted for him something that would have only cheapened Stoner as a character and diminished the power of John Williams' tale. What I wanted for William Stoner would have made it a different and lesser novel.

Stoner speaks back to this age as it spoke back to the age of Aquarius when it was written.

William Stoner stays when going is easier. He exercises restraint when anger would be justified.

If I make him sound an insufferable bore, it is because in ways he is. But there is above all stoicism. I don't have the elegance to capture the fullness of the nobility of Stoner's stoicism.

So I will hand it to John Williams:

"And he would feel that he was out of time… The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape."

Author Steve Almond in his book William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, writes simply: "William Stoner's dignity makes me feel undignified."

An antidote to alienation

As Almond points out, Stoner is no hero as we would know it. Instead the book "captures with unbearable fidelity the moments of internal tumult that mark every human life".

In Stoner, John Williams traverses issues of class, ambition, betrayal, marriage and love…especially love — how we fail it and how it fails us. But at the end there is only love.

Stoner is an antidote to a time too dominated by what philosopher Judith Shklar – drawing on Hegel — called the "unhappy consciousness"; "alienated", "wallowing in its own futility."

Shklar, more than half a century ago diagnosed this creeping malaise: "Self-betrayal, helplessness and frustration in the face of an over-powering external world — such are the conditions of all existence, or at least of life today."

We are not masters of our own creation but the victims of all we have not created. "Victimhood", Shklar wrote, "has become a metaphysical category."

Stoner is a novel from another time about a life in a time before that. The "perfect novel" does not mean the unblemished novel. In fact it is far from perfect. It is flawed, it fails. But isn't that what brings us back to great works, precisely because they are imperfect as we are imperfect.

Some critics accuse Williams of, at times, caricature especially when it comes to wealth and privilege. Others question – quite fairly — his depiction of women. It is also an utterly white world.

Of course we can engage in the critical fashion du jour and apply the politics and sensibilities of our time to critique a work of another age.

Or we can sit with this novel as it is. A story of people wounded each in their own way and living with their wounds. The people of John Williams novel are — like us all — to some degree unknowable to each other.

'Marriage reveals us all'

At its heart it is a novel of a marriage and as Steve Almond says "the brutal ways in which marriage reveals us all." In our closest relationships we are at our best and our worst.

William Stoner's wife, Edith, is John Williams' most complex and compelling character. She reveals Williams' own limitations, he gives us the literal Edith but even Williams cannot know the inner Edith. Not as he knows Stoner himself. Same for me as a reader.

This marriage is troubling and to a contemporary reader — as it is to me — at times deeply disturbing. I understand why some people have said they had to put the book down.

William Stoner does not emerge virtuous or blameless. He contributes to the pain he also suffers. His indifference is its own cruelty. And then there are moments of tenderness and gentle forgiveness. Just like life.

Given the novel is about William Stoner the dominant point of view is his. And I agree with Steve Almond, there is a great exposition of Edith to be written by someone with the depth and humanity to render it.

So why do I read Stoner? Because of the artistry of the language, to escape into another time, to be elevated and humbled. To measure myself as great art demands. To be reminded that life is lived in miniature not in the grand sweep of history. Lives are not artefacts or political statements. History happens around us but it doesn't explain us.

To most of us, in fact history is incidental. I have reported on enough war and catastrophe to know that the travails of the everyday don't stop, in fact they are amplified. People still love and laugh and cry and despair and hope. Together our small lives power our world.

These past years we have been captive to events beyond our control: COVID, China, economic strife, death and war. But doesn't it all remind us that the greatest struggles are waged within ourselves?

Stoner was a balm for my wounded soul. I read it every year to remind me of that time and how near the pain still is and how grateful I am that I came through. I come back to it to measure how far I've come and how far I have still to go. I return to it to gather the grace for what is inevitable and know that in passing we will in time be forgotten.

Stoner. I have said is a novel of another time – and I suppose that makes it timeless. It is not a novel of fleeting fashion. Stoner is a novel of immanence.

Stan Grant presents China Tonight on Monday at 9.35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on  ABC News Channel.

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Stoner, By John Williams: Book of a lifetime

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Stoner is a wonderful novel, rich and sombre, a record of pain and loss but also of moments of vision and tenderness.

The writing is factual, full of what the American poet Wallace Stevens called "the plain sense of things", a kind of steady, stoical reckoning with reality, with low dampness and shabbiness and freezing cold.

It places our solitary hero in a world that does not obviously care about him. But it is touched with that frail and saving beauty – those flashing iridescent ice crystals – that make this world not only bearable but positively alive and alluring.

In the opening chapter, William Stoner has arrived at university from a bleak farming background, a figure "brown and passive as the earth from which it had emerged", in order to study agriculture but at its first exposure to literature, Stoner's mind catches fire and he finds a vocation as a literary scholar that alienates him from that home forever and places him where he will spend the rest of his life.

In fewer than 300 pages, the novel presents a complete biography of Stoner, from his rural birth to the fading of his memory among colleagues and students after his death. To do so while constantly compelling the reader's attention requires a certain sureness of pacing and perspective.

This is an element of the novelist's art that is hard to talk about and impossible to demonstrate in a review so you'll just have to take my word that Stoner's narrative rhythm, its spacing of event, is flawless.

The medium of time feels almost palpably present as the book records the fluctuations of sex into and out of a marriage, the birth and growth of a beloved daughter, the long and tortuous machinations of a professional enmity, the late discovery of love, and the very last moments of Stoner's life. The novel flows like a river, calm and smooth at the surface of its unruffled prose, but powerful and deep.

It's a tough-minded book, not at all falsely consoling or afraid of the mortal facts, but it always shines with that iridescence that is ultimately revealed to be a vision of love and a life well lived.

"Now in his middle age he began to know that [love] was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

'In the Wolf's Mouth' by Adam Foulds is published by Jonathan Cape in February 2014

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Books and other leisurely pursuits

Book Review :: Stoner

About stoner, the book.

Stoner , the story of an unassuming English professor at the University of Missouri, went practically unnoticed when it was published in 1965 (fewer than 2,000 copies sold). Only after it started getting attention from readers in Europe, did home audiences reconsider, affirm its value and even publish a 50th Anniversary edition. Now, its sales are in the millions, and it has been translated into more than 20 languages.

For me, Stoner is a near perfect novel. The prose can only be described as beautiful. It has structure, characters, symbolism, imagery, mood – this is the type of book that makes me wistful for my days teaching literature. There’s too much to talk about here, and so I’ve linked to other articles for continued reading below.

Synopsis of Stoner

The title character, William Stoner, is an introvert. Having grown up on a farm, he has no plans, no expectations for the future until he his put on the spot one day in his English class. He is asked what a specific Shakespearean sonnet means and – as if for the first time – he understands that there is meaning beyond what is apparent. And, that it is possible to die feeling like a life devoted to something of value will make the inevitability of death less tragic. In this moment Stoner finds license to leave agriculture and pursue literature.

He went out of Jesse Hall into the morning, and the grayness no longer seemed to oppress the campus; it led his eyes outward and upward into the sky, where he looked as if toward a possibility for which he had no name.

In the course of his life, he loves three women: his wife Edith, his daughter Grace, and a lover, Katherine. But the greatest love in his life is that of literature. This life-long pursuit culminates in the most poignant death scene I’ve read in modern literature. (That’s not a spoiler; it’s revealed in the first paragraph.)

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at the first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

There are two antagonists – Edith, who’s evil nature can be compared to Kathy of East of Eden or Ron Rash’s Serena , and Lomax, the department chair who practices revenge on Stoner for Stoner’s actions against Lomax’s protégé. These two forces create an interesting parallel between his “loves” and more importantly how he is motivated (or not motivated) to stand up for himself against them.

Buy it or Bail?

I don’t know how to (first) write a review that is worthy of Stoner and that (second) will convince all readers to pick this up if they haven’t. I can simply say that you should. You will not be sorry, except for the time that it took for you to be convinced to do so.

There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

Others have written more eloquently and at more length than I about Stoner . I encourage you to read their essays:

The New Yorker

Huffington Post

The Guardian

There are plenty more, but these are the four I most enjoyed.

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Book review :: tell me everything, book club :: book ratings for 2023-2024, book brief :: death at the sign of the rook by kate atkinson, joint review :: erasure & american fiction, 4 replies to “ book review :: stoner ”.

Added to the TBR!

Thanks for the review! I probably would have passed this by because of the title, thinking it was about a guy who liked to get high on weed! But it actually sounds like something I would love, about introverts, love, and life of the mind.

I read Stoner for the first time a number of years ago and it has become my #1 recommendation when someone asks for a book suggestion. Very nice review!

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The Inner Lives of Men

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By Morris Dickstein

• June 17, 2007

Since academic novels usually focus on the nasty rivalries and inflated egos of their characters, they have served as vehicles for broad satire, not serious themes. One great exception is Willa Cather’s 1925 novel, “The Professor’s House.” Cather used the traditional calling of a scholar and the atrophy of his marriage to convey her own growing alienation from the modern world. Her novel has only one successor, another book that invokes the life of learning as a rebuke to the wasteful wars and cheap compromises of the wider world. John Williams’s “Stoner” is something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away. Ignored on publication in 1965, a clamorous year, it has been kept alive by enthusiasts who go into print every decade to rediscover it, including Irving Howe in The New Republic in 1966, C. P. Snow in The Financial Times in 1973, Dan Wakefield in Ploughshares in 1981 and Steve Almond in Tin House in 2003. They invariably wonder why no one has heard of the book. “Why isn’t this book famous?” Snow kept asking. Now, along with Williams’s earlier novel, “Butcher’s Crossing” (1960), “Stoner” is available in a handsome reprint by New York Review Books. Both books deserve to be widely read, but their dark, comfortless vision raises the question of whether this can be expected.

Williams, not to be confused with the prolific African-American novelist John A. Williams (the author of “The Man Who Cried I Am”), was born in East Texas in 1922 and fell in love with literature in high school. His grandparents had been farmers, and his stepfather worked as a janitor in the local post office. Williams worked at odd jobs after flunking out of junior college, then served in India and Burma in the Army Air Corps during World War II, where he wrote an apprentice novel in his spare time. The G.I. Bill enabled him to go to college in Denver and take a Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, where “Stoner” is set a generation earlier. A scholar and a poet as well as a novelist, Williams went on to found the writing program at the University of Denver, where he taught for more than three decades. He retired in 1985 and died in 1994.

Though strikingly different in subject, Williams’s novels share a simple, resonant, sculptured style, eloquent in its restraint. He enjoyed a blip of fame when “Augustus,” a brilliant epistolary novel about Octavius Caesar and ancient Rome, shared the National Book Award in 1973. It makes delicious reading for anyone who loved HBO’s recent series “Rome,” but it demands some effort to relate the book to the frontier world of “Butcher’s Crossing” or the academic setting of “Stoner.” Yet all three novels show a similar narrative arc: a young man’s initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.

In “Butcher’s Crossing” a young man, inspired by Emerson to strike out on his own, drops out of Harvard and uses a small legacy to bankroll the last buffalo hunt in the West. But the expedition, to a pristine valley in the Colorado Rockies, turns into an orgy of pointless slaughter, driven by the obsessions of an Ahab-like leader whose men are stranded in the mountains through a fierce and desperate winter. Though given up for dead, they return in the spring to the aptly named Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing — think “Deadwood” — to discover that fashions have changed; their dearly purchased buffalo hides are worthless. One of their party died along the way, another has lost his mind. The young man’s only profit is experience, but on his return he’s ready for his first love affair, the other face of his entry into manhood. For everyone else, including the reader, the failed venture exposes the hollow beauty, the vast loneliness of the West and the blood-soaked brutality with which our people subdued it. Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, “Butcher’s Crossing” paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.

“Stoner” is a western in a more poignant sense. Its hero, the son of hard-working, dirt-poor farmers, inherits their taciturn stoicism, born of sheer adversity — their hardened accommodation to the whims of fate. William Stoner enters the state university in 1910 to study agriculture, but his life changes irrevocably when he comes upon literature in a sophomore survey course. His future mentor humiliates him by asking him to explain Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, a poem about love and loss that foreshadows Stoner’s own future. Shakespeare’s aging speaker compares himself to “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” and adds: “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire, / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie.” Following Stoner through two world wars, the novel captures both the fire of his inarticulate passion and the glowing embers it leaves behind.

Only two passions matter in Stoner’s life, love and learning, and in a sense he fails at both. His wife, his first love, turns cold and repellent almost from the moment he meets her. Their honeymoon, in which she submits to him with distaste, must be one of the grimmest ever recorded in fiction. Soon we learn, with a clang of inevitability, that “within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve. He learned silence and did not insist upon his love.” Stoner’s deeply ingrained reticence is a keystone of the novel. This is the story of an ordinary man, seemingly thwarted at every turn, but also of the knotty integrity he preserves, the deep inner life behind the impassive facade.

The man’s professional career could also be seen as a failure, though it gives him quiet satisfaction. He is neither a great teacher nor a noted scholar but applies himself to both with an intensity born of love. In literature he senses a depth of human understanding beyond his power to express, “an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.” Williams writes about this with an almost Roman gravity. “It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.” This separates him painfully from his parents, his former life. A gifted but bitter colleague, touched by the same knowledge, turns against him in one of those toxic departmental feuds that bedevils the rest of his career. The one book Stoner produces is soon forgotten. His distrust of glib brilliance, his concern with ancient theories of grammar and rhetoric, make him look pedantic. Stoner’s cast of mind is monastic, unworldly. He is reduced to teaching menial courses to students who only dimly sense the warmth and conviction he brings to them.

The same quiet depth of feeling redeems his love life. Caught in an empty shell of a marriage, though too stoical to end it, he bonds deeply with his young daughter. But his resentful wife evicts him from his daughter’s life, as she evicts them both from the book-lined study where they often take refuge. Stoner responds with a helpless sense of resignation. But in his 40s he begins an affair with a talented scholar half his age, which leads to a precious interlude of unlooked-for happiness. Like his discovery of literature, this intimacy becomes an awakening to the possibilities of life. Their deep attraction, luminously described, combines love and learning as forms of passionate knowing — the true North Star of Williams’s fiction. “Day by day, the layers of reserve that protected them dropped away. ... They made love, and talked, and made love again, like children who did not think of tiring at their play.” Though their affair is broken up by Stoner’s academic nemesis, who threatens scandal, it offers a hint of paradise that hovers dreamily over the rest of the novel.

Stoner’s physical decline is premature but inexorable, his death almost anonymous. Yet few stories this sad could be so secretly triumphant, or so exhilarating. Williams brings to Stoner’s fate a quality of attention, a rare empathy, that shows us why this unassuming life was worth living.

An essay, "The Inner Lives of Men," on June 17, about the writer John Williams and the reissue of his novel "Stoner," misidentified the founder of the creative writing program at the University of Denver. It was Alan Swallow — not Williams, who was an early faculty member in the program and taught there for many years.

How we handle corrections

Morris Dickstein’s most recent book is “A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World.” He teaches English at the CUNY Graduate Center and is president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

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University of Texas Press, 2018

Contributor Bio

Emily van duyne, more online by emily van duyne.

• The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel

By charles j. shields, reviewed by emily van duyne.

The title of this biography of the mid-twentieth-century American writer John Williams is a reference to Williams’s third novel, Stoner. First published in 1965, Stoner was “lightly reviewed,” selling only about 2000 copies in its first year of publication. Williams nevertheless considered it his masterpiece, and his editor at Viking, Cork Smith, agreed. After Stoner’ s disappointing sales, Smith wrote to its author, “This in no way diminishes our feelings about the novel. You were right and we were right.” In a rare rave review from the time of publication, the influential critic Irving Howe similarly recognized the work’s merits, describing it in the New Republic as “serious, beautiful and affecting.”

Despite Howe’s praise, Stoner was soon forgotten, and decades passed before it reemerged onto the literary scene. In 2006, the New York Review of Books rereleased it under their Classics imprint. A 2007 New York Times article followed, in which Morris Dickstein called the book “the perfect novel.” This led to translations into French and Dutch, widespread European publications, and the “Stonermania” detailed in Shields’s epilogue. Reviews by high-profile authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Julian Barnes eventually helped the book to take off in the United States after its initial European popularity.

Stoner tracks the life, career, and death of William Stoner, a man from a hardscrabble Missouri farm who becomes an English professor. Well-meaning and unassuming, Stoner is emotionally stunted to the point of ruin. Both he and his friends and family move awkwardly through their lives, bumping into one another like strangers trapped in a ghastly stage play. When they do anything outside of the ordinary or conventional—such as when Stoner’s beloved but estranged daughter comes to tell him she is pregnant out of wedlock—it comes as a surprise to the reader, because their inner lives and motivations are so absent from the page. Despite the novel’s bare-bones characterization, its devotion to its title character makes it a success. Stoner’s capacity for love, of teaching, his family, and later, a woman he has an impassioned extramarital affair with, are beautifully rendered; when he dies at the end, his own book in his hand, I wept.

Charles J. Shields’s sketchy portrayal of John Williams in The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel reads like Williams’s own portrayal of Stoner, absent the integrity that makes the fictional hero so appealing. Stoner loves his wife Edith deeply, despite her coldness, and tries hard to make their marriage work. Williams, by contrast, marries so many times I lost count. Shields gives the reader little sense of who his wives were or why Williams married them. Instead, he spends a baffling number of pages describing Willard “Butch” Marsh, Williams’s sister’s first husband, a writer I wager most people have never heard of, and whom Williams detested . Perhaps Shields wanted Marsh to mirror Lomax, William Stoner’s sinister department rival: in Stoner, Lomax’s empty charisma is the opposite of the protagonist’s insistent morality. But there is no such productive contrast to be found between Williams and Marsh: both were hard-drinking career writers who experienced tumultuous domestic lives and occasional writing success.

Williams, like his most famous character, was a professor of English and creative writing, and The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel aims to portray “the writing life” for its reader. Its version of this life is a very particular one: Williams was an alcoholic who was often too drunk to teach his classes at the University of Denver, and he was a serial womanizer. Competitive and jealous, he disparaged his colleagues and regarded the presence of Harvard-educated women like Peggy McIntosh, who entered his department in 1969, as “an imposition.” One of the most vivid moments in the biography comes shortly after the publication of Irving Howe’s review of Stoner :

[Williams] knew that a few of his colleagues subscribed to The New Republic, so [ … ] all day he sat in the reception area [ … ] drinking coffee and smoking, as his fellow instructors walked past, to and from class [ … ] most said nothing. A friend in the department, Robert Pawlowski, wasn’t surprised. “[ … ] great jealousy lived in a number of his colleagues and he stoically suffered them,” Pawlowski later said. At five o’clock, when the halls had emptied out, Williams went into his office and closed the door behind him.

The image of a grown man seeking attention in this way is grim, and I questioned Shields’s implicit endorsement of Pawlowski’s read on the situation: Williams’s difficult nature makes it seem possible that his colleagues’ reticence stemmed from personal dislike rather than from professional jealousy.

Trained as a scholar of Renaissance literature, Williams later became deeply involved in the academicization of creative writing. He repeatedly attended the famed Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a teacher, helped to found the Key West Literary Seminar, and served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). But the significance of these experiences—if there was any—is lost: his AWP presidency, for instance, is mentioned only once. Is this because the significance was also lost on Williams? If it is, it leaves one wondering why Williams is the subject of a biography.

More successful are Shields’s descriptions of Williams’s early life. Born in 1922, he was raised in Witchita Falls, Texas, and voluntarily enlisted in the Air Force during the Second World War, working as a radio technician on Allied resupply planes that flew from the Sookerating airfield on the India-Tibet border, over the Himalayas. Shields’s prose here is electrifying: “The C-47 was a workhorse, but when the wings were glazed with ice, it waddled drunkenly [ … ] If the plane crashed in the jungle, tribes of headhunters—the tattooed Naga people—were down there to meet them.” Williams’s wartime adventures strike the reader as more than enough fodder for any budding novelist. Nevertheless, Williams vastly exaggerated his experience, lying about being shot down by “a shell from a spring-loaded Japanese knee mortar.” He claimed that he suffered broken ribs, that five members of the crew were killed, and that the survivors nearly starved in the jungle, skinning a monkey and roasting it, so that it looked, in Williams’s words, “like a baby on a spit.”

“Call it lying, but writers call it creating fiction,” Shields writes in relation to Williams’s tall tale, not seeming to notice that Williams never included his invented war story in any of his fiction. It’s a whopper he brought out at parties. Later, when Williams publishes an anthology of Renaissance poetry, he is accused of plagiarizing one of his idols (the Renaissance scholar Yvor Winters). Shields makes no comment on the incident, or what it says about Williams’s character. Nor does he connect it to his lies about his wartime experience. Williams steadfastly denied the plagiarism, claiming instead the anthology was an expression of ardor for his academic and poetic idol. This is thrown into serious doubt near the end of the book when one of Williams’s former students, renowned poet Heather McHugh, says that she regularly watched him plagiarize others in his lectures.

A jacket blurb proclaims this book to be “a masterful depiction of the generation of burnt-out alcoholic American writers who survived WWII.” Maybe, but when I closed the book, I felt I had no idea who John Williams was, beyond a drunken and belligerent caricature. This was not the case when I closed Stoner after rereading it just before this biography. Whether this is because Williams was a better novelist than he is a subject, or simply because The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel fails to capture that ineffable quality each of us carries, I can’t say. But I would recommend Williams’s novel before I would recommend his biography.

Published on October 20, 2020

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The Two-Way

Book news: 'stoner' created little buzz in 1965, but ignites in 2013.

Annalisa Quinn

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• John Williams' novel Stoner sold a scant 2,000 copies when it was released almost 50 years ago. An understated novel about a Missouri academic named William Stoner, it went out of print the following year. But through a mysterious, even alchemical process, Stoner became one of the most talked-about books of 2013. Republished in 2006 by New York Review Books Classics, it was celebrated in the press. The novelist Colum McCann rhapsodized about it in The Guardian , calling it "one of the great forgotten novels of the past century ... so beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic." The following year, The New York Times called it "a perfect novel." But it wasn't until Anna Gavalda translated it into French in 2011 that the book saw real commercial success, becoming a bestseller across much of Europe . That success began to seep into the English-speaking world. Last week, the U.K. bookstore Waterstones named it book of the year. Waterstones' managing editor, James Daunt, said, "It is incredible that Stoner had effectively disappeared and wonderful that a wave of recommendation and word of mouth has seen this exhilarating novel sweep all before it in 2013."
• Literary celebrations of Nelson Mandela continue, with Maya Angelou writing and performing a poem for the late South African leader. "Yes, Mandela's day is done," she said in a video released by the U.S. State Department. "Yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation." Meanwhile, the novelist Ayana Mathis writes in a meditation on Mandela: "That word, 'heroism,' like 'leader' or 'courage,' is inadequate. It breaks like rock in confrontation with the man himself."
• In Bookforum , Heather Havrilesky compares literary contemporaries Nora Ephron and Joan Didion: "When life gave Ephron lemons ... she made a giant vat of really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her friends' friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades. Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in all of its sooty wretchedness — which is precisely what this mixed-up world does to everything that's fresh and young and full of promise."

The Best Book Coming Out This Week:

• Published by the literary magazine n+1, No Regrets: Three Discussions is billed as "a book of women talking about the processes of becoming themselves." These conversations about books and life from women, including writers Elif Batuman and Emily Gould, feel at once intimate and erudite. Editor Dayna Tortorici writes in her introduction, "Women speak to one another differently in rooms without men. Not better, not more honestly, not more or less intelligently — just differently, and in a way one doesn't see portrayed as often as one might like."
• Nelson Mandela
• Nora Ephron
• Maya Angelou
• Joan Didion

Revisiting the Classics: Stoner

• September 25, 2014
• Book Reviews

Last year Julian Barnes writing in the Guardian declared Stoner the “must-read novel of 2013.”  Word was getting around.  Fifty years after this American novel was published, Stoner had become a word-of-mouth bestseller— in Europe .  Stranger things have happened.

Two acquaintances mentioned the book to me as well as among the best depictions of the academic world they knew of.  I’ve now finished reading this hard story—of a boy raised on a hardscrabble Missouri farm more than a century ago, who becomes an English professor at the University of Missouri, stoically suffers disappointment after disappointment, and dies at age 65—and I’ll offer my own small commendation to the chorus. 

Stoner was written by the semi-forgotten novelist John Williams (1922-1994), best known for his 1972 novel Augustus , which won the National Book Award.  Stoner appeared in 1965 and received some critical praise and reasonable sales.  To a few readers, however, the book proved important, and it was resurrected in 2003 by the estimable series, the New York Review of Books Classics, which has brought back into circulation a great many unjustly neglected works.

Stoner is an outwardly bleak tale that achieves that mid-20 th century distinction of being inwardly bleak as well.  Though it is told in the flat tone of American realism, the sensibility owes something to Camus and other European existentialists.  Stoner spends most of the novel simply enduring—enduring the mindless farm chores of his nearly voiceless parents; enduring humiliation as the uncultured, ill-clothed, ignorant farm boy at college; enduring the death of his best friend who has foolishly enlisted in the army to fight in the hell of the Great War; enduring a frigid wife who becomes a domestic tyrant; enduring a sadistic English department colleague who becomes his chairman and sentences him to a lifelong career as an assistant professor teaching freshman English at odd times and in shabby classrooms; enduring the forced end to his extra-marital affair, which had provided the one episode of emotional fulfillment in his whole life; enduring his beloved daughter’s descent into alcoholism; and enduring his own death from intestinal cancer. 

The bleakness of Stoner is deep down.  As a young man in his first college English class, Stoner is confronted by an intimidating professor who recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (“Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”) and asks Stoner what it means.  Stoner stammers, “It means,” and is unable to continue. From the ashes of this failure, Stoner rises to a love of literature and to a genuine talent for seeing connections.  “It means.”  But his capacity to say what it means so that others can understand—his students, his wife, his colleagues—is meager.  He is trapped in his own peculiar inarticulateness on the things that matter most to him. 

The book Stoner most reminds me of is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1990) which also relentlessly follows the tale of a man trapped inside himself.  Like Ishiguro’s English butler, Williams’ English professor is a mostly sympathetic figure but one who frustrates the reader by his passivity.  Stoner could act against his miserable circumstances, but typically he backs down, retreats into silence, and takes a sullen pride in just sticking things out.  “It doesn’t matter,” is his refrain when faced with a new setback, and even in his last moments when he picks up his sole published book from his bedside, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use.”

The adverb “hardly” carries a lot of weight in that sentence. The book does matter to him, as a testament to his best effort, and his last sensation is “a tingling, as if those pages were alive.”

Barnes, like other commenters, observes that the prose is “clean and quiet” and the tone “a little wry.”  Those are good qualities but not so rare as to create a posthumous phenomenon.  What makes the book feel larger than the story of one man’s disappointments suffered in near silence is its depiction of a life lived in and through books.  Stoner could be compared to George Eliot’s Mr. Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch , the pedant whose great scholarly dream comes to nothing, but we never feel that Stoner is self-deluding or merely a pedant.  He loves literature and ideas.  He is, as his author said of him an interview many years later, a hero.  At least a hero of sorts.  He remains dedicated to his love of literature no matter the personal costs.  And he has a soulful regard for the self-inflicted losses to civilization as young men trudge off to war in his youth and again in his high middle age. 

Perhaps Stoner’s stoicism is destined to remain more appealing to Europeans who can see more vividly than Americans the deterioration of their great cultural traditions. But Stoner is a book for Americans too—those Americans who persist in loving the great imaginative works and poetic accomplishments of the last two or three thousand years and who, like Stoner, will go down to their graves knowing that they have held something precious. 

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DEATH BY METAPHOR

For the Love of Words

Book Review: Stoner by John Williams

A study in stoicism.

Reflections and Thoughts

To read John William’s “Stoner” is to regard a decrepit building by the sidewalk, falling into disrepair. It is a study of slow decay, sometimes propelled by external forces in its neighborhood until it collapses under its weight. We are, with our hands tied, forced to witness an act of destruction upon a man who remains undeterred until the very end, characterized by his endurance, faith, and extraordinary grace. 

The story requires to be heard, to be examined, and to be recollected in solitude, despite its ordinariness and lacking explosive episodes. The lives of the characters in these stories are straightforward; without kinks. Such is the story of William Stoner, who enters the University of Missouri as a student and teaches there until his death. What is then so overwhelming about this book is a life lived in quiet desperation? Marred with hardships from the early years of life that are imbibed in his bones to being estranged from the people he carries a love for, turning, over the years, a stranger to himself, Stoner learns and masters the art of resilience. Love is fleeting, always like a source-less hum in the distance. The unfeigned love for his wife is short-lived owing to her refusal to partake in the pleasures of marriage, and with time turns from obligation to indifference. His unbounded affection and attachment towards his daughter are blemished with sporadic acts of sabotage by his wife. His only redemption is ephemeral, and it is in this brief episode of intimacy and love, albeit being “uncommon” and “taboo” with a fellow student that he is bestowed with kindness, warmth, and closeness that he yearned for and was denied. 

Amidst the violence that unfolds in the form of two world wars, the long-standing feud with a fellow (pompous) professor, misadventures, trifling convocations and gatherings, his steadfastness makes him our hero. His unequivocal devotion to literature and academics is paramount. The joy in the simple pleasures of reading and writing transcends the darkness that looms over him. His competence and passion for teaching create ripples in lives that will outlive him. His seclusion from the trivialities and mediocrities of life is a quality that most lack. To characterize Stoner is to cram qualities in a man who remains modest throughout, never giving himself airs.

Yet, we watch his deterioration with the gradual decline in his health — his frail body unable to perform the simplest tasks. While we whimper at his state, he maintains the stature of a stoic. Though his body turns hostile, his mind for the most remains composed. There is a momentary satisfaction in learning that he died surrounded by books — the sole thing that gave his life a purpose. How much can a man endure before giving in? Is there any meaning to human suffering? If there is dignity in preserving one’s principle then at what cost? The novel is an allegory of stoicism. It remains as an account for a man who, until the end, remained incorruptible. 

The building has collapsed and what remains is the debris of what stood sturdy. Perhaps, it will remain in plain sight. One day, someone will stumble upon the remains: a diary, a long-forgotten work, a piece of art, and bring it to light. The writer of this novel John Williams saw a similar fate. In many ways, the story is a retelling of the author’s life. But, as they say, some works stand the test of time, this book has. It will continue to be a message-in-a-bottle for those who find themselves stranded in the ocean as it did for me. William Stoner is now my hero.

About the Author

John Edward Williams  (August 29, 1922 – March 3, 1994) was an American author, editor and professor. His famous works include Butcher’s Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and Augustus (1972).

He devoted his life to the study of literature, writing, and teaching. Upon completing his MA, Williams enrolled at the  University of Missouri , where he taught and worked on his Ph.D. in English Literature, which he obtained in 1954. In the fall of 1955, Williams returned to the University of Denver as an Assistant Professor, becoming director of the creative-writing program. In a 1986 interview, he was asked, “And literature is written to be entertaining?” to which he replied,

“Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid.” JOHN WILLIAMS

“Stoner” was his third book that ran out of print in 1965. This masterfully crafted book stood the test of time and finally found the right audience when it was re-issued by  New York Review Books  in the year 2005. It has then gone on to receive widespread critical acclaim and praise. In 2011, “Stoner” became a best seller in France, the Netherlands, Israel, Italy, and the UK.

Notable Quotes from john william’s Stoner

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

These quotes helped me contemplate the beauty of knowledge, the dignity of one’s art, and the honesty with which one lives his/her life. It has made me more curious about the surrounding that I live in and in a way appreciate what I once overlooked owing to frivolous pursuits.

Further Reads

My next read would be “ A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ” by Peter Handke. I will be adding the link to my book review once I’ve finished it. Please do let me know in the comment section what you’re reading currently and how it is helping you grow.

Thank you so much for your kind words. I am glad you enjoyed my review. Make sure to check out my other posts and see if they grab your interest.

Writing a review for a book of such standard requires enormous courage and the blogger has a thoroughly read, understand and enjoyed reading the book as amplified by his vivid description. He slowly unfolded the story and kept the reader spell bound. This is a fantastic style of reviewing a book. I truly enjoyed it and looking forward to read much more in coming days.

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Stoner: 50th Anniversary Edition Hardcover – July 30, 2019

Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher NYRB Classics
• Publication date July 30, 2019
• Dimensions 5.49 x 0.87 x 8.77 inches
• ISBN-10 1681374579
• ISBN-13 978-1681374574
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; Anniversary edition (July 30, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1681374579
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681374574
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.49 x 0.87 x 8.77 inches
• #748 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• #1,166 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #3,388 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

John williams.

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Customer reviews

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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 65% 24% 7% 2% 2% 2%

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Customers say

Customers find the writing quality eloquent, well-constructed, and reflective. They describe the book as truly wonderful, overwhelmingly brilliant, and mesmerizing. Readers describe the story as compelling, deeply affecting, and marvelous. They also mention the book evokes a lot of emotion, is soulful, and heartwrenching. Reader also appreciate the relatable, well drawn characters.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the writing quality of the book masterful, with beautifully composed sentences and beautiful descriptions throughout. They say the book is written in a direct, simple style that belies the depth of the story. Readers also mention the book's writing is an example of how wonderful language can be.

"...creator of Stoner, who is able with a deep sense of honesty, exquisite clarity of prose and conviction to make one reflect deeply on all these..." Read more

"...amazon reader praises this book for its "rectitude," a wonderful word to characterize it . But don't let the severity of that word put you off...." Read more

"...UK is a bit of a head-scratcher for most American writers, who find it lovely , flawed, engagingly written, and minor rather than great."..." Read more

"...something very profound and moving, which is surprising because it's a simple , sparely written story, but it touches on some deep and universal..." Read more

Customers find the book wonderful, brilliant, and mesmerizing. They say it's a great find and stunning novel on all levels.

"...produced as one critic suggested, not only a great novel but a near-perfect one , both moving and highly memorable...." Read more

"...It is a terrific and terrifically sad little book, but the way it has taken off in the UK is a bit of a head-scratcher for most American writers,..." Read more

"...I can't really explain the other reasons why this book is so mesmerizing except to say that it worked its magic on me...." Read more

"...It's a superb , solid, 6-stars, lucid, authentic (unmelodramatic), page-turner, staggering, heart-rending, must-read book...." Read more

Customers find the story compelling, deeply affecting, and marvelous. They say it's a heartfelt story told with precision and clarity. Readers also mention the book is a true examination of a life.

"...not only a great novel but a near-perfect one, both moving and highly memorable ...." Read more

"...and moving, which is surprising because it's a simple, sparely written story , but it touches on some deep and universal truths...." Read more

"...It's a superb, solid, 6-stars, lucid, authentic (unmelodramatic), page-turner, staggering, heart-rending, must-read book...." Read more

"...It is not heavily plotted --it tells the story of Stoner's life, from his teenaged years working his parents' relatively meager farm to his..." Read more

Customers find the book believable and evokes a lot of emotion. They say the poignancy is heartwrenching and the story is uplifting.

"...Early in this psychological novel, there is a generous streak of nobility and chivalry to be found in William Stoner's character, both moving and..." Read more

"...that his feelings are completely returned and a sustained description of fully experienced happiness : "In his forty-third year William Stoner..." Read more

"...It is a terrific and terrifically sad little book , but the way it has taken off in the UK is a bit of a head-scratcher for most American writers,..." Read more

"...What was at first a bit of a ho-hum read became something very profound and moving, which is surprising because it's a simple, sparely written story..." Read more

Customers find the characters perfectly written and developed. They also say the book is painfully human and real. Readers also mention the author is brilliant and wonderful at human awkwardness.

"...that I increasingly cared for this decent, intelligent and gentle man . To my mind, he meets the definition of a "Hero"...." Read more

"...Williams is wonderful at human awkwardness , at physical and emotional shyness, at not speaking your mind or your heart, either because you cannot..." Read more

"...This book is painfully human and real and totally deserving of a wide audience...." Read more

"Williams' Stoner is an excellent read: beautifully developed characters against the backdrop , often stark, often sparse, of the American plains,..." Read more

Customers find the writing insightful, engrossing, and brutally honest. They appreciate the effective and fascinating expositions. Readers also mention the book is rich and dense. They say it captures the human experience of personality and life choices.

"...Williams (1922-1994) and creator of Stoner, who is able with a deep sense of honesty , exquisite clarity of prose and conviction to make one reflect..." Read more

"...It is so historically and anatomically precise , I am confident that, if you gave me a sharp knife, a horse and a rope, I could now skin a buffalo..." Read more

"...because it's a simple, sparely written story, but it touches on some deep and universal truths ...." Read more

"...There are also effective and fascinating expositions (again in just a few short pages) of the departmental chair and his supposed protege in how..." Read more

Customers find the book quiet and realistic. They appreciate the truthfulness that pervades the pages and makes it easy to identify with the people and events. Readers also find the man's life comforting, melodic, and understated. They mention the book has a quiet but dramatic ending.

"...And the prose was clean and quiet; and the tone a little wry ...." Read more

"...This is a book that is understated and quiet , but I think the power behind Stoner’s story is that it can speak to each individual in various ways...." Read more

"...Williams tells a quiet story of a quiet man . The mood is contemplative, thoughtful, and observational...." Read more

"...as adults, capable of making their own way through his eloquent, quiet prose . It evoked in me sympathy, empathy, indignation and a pensive attitude...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some mention it's fantastically moving and the action is deftly handled. Others say the story itself is a little slow and the plot never picks up.

"...and chivalry to be found in William Stoner's character, both moving and real , and I found myself following this young man's awakening with emotion..." Read more

"...In STONER there is no real dramatic arc . There is poor old Stoner, his awful family and nothing.You might say the same is true of , Beckett...." Read more

"...as individuals with both flaws and virtues in this fine and moving book ." Read more

"...was at first a bit of a ho-hum read became something very profound and moving , which is surprising because it's a simple, sparely written story, but..." Read more

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The stoner thriller canon has a new candidate: Lou Berney’s novel ‘Dark Ride’

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By Lou Berney William Morrow: 256 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The hero of Lou Berney’s new thriller, “ Dark Ride ,” isn’t an unreliable narrator so much as a perpetually stoned one, taking bong rips and sparking up his one-hitter and passing along a joint as effortlessly as he breathes.

Hardy Reed, nicknamed “Hardly” (as in hardly ever tries), works as a scarer in a run-down haunted frontier attraction in a city that sounds like Berney’s native Oklahoma City. He did a little college and earned a steady B- average. His best friends, Nguyen and Mallory, spend their days watching reruns of “The Office ” and, yes, getting stoned. “It must be exhausting to have so many strong opinions,” he theorizes as he overhears an argument about something unimportant near the novel’s beginning. “I only have mild preferences, and usually not even that.”

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“Dark Ride” is the story of how a committed slacker learns to give a damn and the tremendous price he pays for doing so. The process starts so suddenly he doesn’t even see the shift coming (then again, he’s high as a kite). Stuck paying parking tickets in a faceless municipal building, he spots a young boy and girl, maybe 6 or 7, on a bench; he notices marks on their skin that could only be cigarette burns.

Hardly tries to do the right thing through official channels, figuring he can at least file a report, only to discover what countless others have in real life: Bringing a child abuser to justice is a long, winding bureaucratic process.

But he can’t let it go. The experience of actually caring about something has seized a hold of him like a drug, but with the opposite effect of all that weed. He can’t just pass it along, even as it takes him to some increasingly dark and dangerous places. On the way, he finds himself stepping in line with the heroes of other stoner thrillers: Doc Sportello in “ Inherent Vice ,” Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s revisionist take on “ The Long Goodbye .”

The author has a gift for creating characters and stories that infuse even the most sordid corners of humanity with an unforced gentleness. He pulled this off in his fine JFK assassination novel, “ November Road ,” about a patsy (no, not Lee Harvey Oswald) who befriends a mother and her children as he flees a mob assassin. (That book is in development for the big screen, to be directed by Lawrence Kasdan .)

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Berney’s heroes are sucked into opportunities for second chances almost against their will — at least initially. “The absence of free will takes a lot of the stress out of life,” Hardly muses, before his life gets far more stressful. “Go with the flow because the flow knows where to go. You’re where you’re supposed to be.” But as Hardly starts tracking the suspected abuser, one of those punish-the-IRS lawyers with obnoxious TV commercials and a strip mall office, his flow changes irreversibly, and his free will gets a boost. Soon he’s got the broken ribs and busted nose to prove it.

He finds himself assembling a ragtag team of accomplices, most of whom grow more alarmed the deeper he gets into his obsession. There’s Felice, the older real estate agent (and former private investigator) with whom he falls into bed (not too realistically). Eleanor, the caustic, gay goth chick, works at the municipal office and takes a reluctant liking to (or at least sympathy for) Hardly. And Salvador, the socially awkward, over-eager teen, works with him at Haunted Frontier. Berney gives them all room to grow along with Hardly.

He isn’t quite as good with Hardly’s targets, who never really become anything more than the hero’s unknowing catalysts. This isn’t unusual for twist-driven genre fiction, but it’s notable for Berney, who is usually better with character than he needs to be. Then again, this is the story of one man’s transformation from apathetic stoner to avenging angel, and if it gets tunnel vision, it also keeps the pages turning at a rapid clip. Berney’s thrillers have more weight than most, and more soul, and “Dark Ride” lives up to his established standards.

‘Inherent Vice’ goes for Los Angeles as state of mind rather than destination

Ask any member of Paul Thomas Anderson’s design team about scouting locations for “Inherent Vice” and you’ll get a story almost as meandering as the film’s plot.

Dec. 27, 2014

The author also really knows how to end things. The final stretch of the story makes for breathless reading; as the cascade of action pours forth you wonder how long Berney can sustain the tension, and just how far over his head Hardly has gotten.

Berney writes one-off novels, not series; he’s free to take his characters where he likes without worrying about setting up the next book. In ”Dark Ride” he takes full advantage of that freedom. The novel doesn’t shirk the high stakes it establishes. Hardly has one chance to pull this off. It’s a big risk for a guy accustomed to disappearing in a cloud of smoke. His trip is ultimately about what it means to become an engaged human being, and the question of whether getting off life’s sidelines is worth the risk.

Vognar is a freelance writer based in Houston.

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Stoner: 50th Anniversary Edition

By john williams , introduction by john mcgahern.

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The critic Morris Dickstein has said that John Williams’s Stoner “is something much rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel,” and in the last decade this austere and deeply moving tale of a Midwestern college professor has been embraced by readers all over the world. Here, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Stoner , NYRB Classics offers a special hardback edition of the book that also includes a previously unpublished correspondence between John Williams and his agent about its writing and publication.

Download the Reading Group Guide for Stoner .

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics ISBN: 9781681374574 Pages: 336 Publication Date: July 30, 2019

A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life…I’m amazed a novel this good escaped general attention for so long. —Ian McEwan

One of the great unheralded 20th-century American novels …Almost perfect. —Bret Easton Ellis

Stoner is a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer. —Ruth Rendell

A beautiful and moving novel, as sweeping, intimate, and mysterious as life itself. —Geoff Dyer

I have read few novels as deep and as clear as Stoner . It deserves to be called a quiet classic of American literature. —Chad Harbach

The most beautiful book in the world. —Emma Straub

It’s simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it’s one of the most fascinating things that you’ve ever come across. —Tom Hanks, Time

The book begins boldly with a mention of Stoner’s death, and a nod to his profound averageness: ‘Few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.’ By the end, though, Williams has made Stoner’s disappointing life into such a deep and honest portrait, so unsoftened and unromanticized, that it’s quietly breathtaking. — The Boston Globe

Williams’ descriptions of the experience of reading both elucidate and evince the pleasures of literary language; the ‘minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words’ in which Stoner finds joy are re-enacted in Williams’ own perfect fusion of words. — n+1

Stoner , by John Williams, is a slim novel, and not a particularly joyous one. But it is so quietly beautiful and moving, so precisely constructed, that you want to read it in one sitting and enjoy being in it, altered somehow, as if you have been allowed to wear an exquisitely tailored garment that you don’t want to take off. — The Globe and Mail

One of the great forgotten novels of the past century. I have bought at least 50 copies of it in the past few years, using it as a gift for friends…The book is so beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic. —Colum McCann, Top 10 Novels, The Guardian

Stoner is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-Gatsby… Part of Stoner ’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair… ;The novel embodies the very virtues it exalts, the same virtues that probably relegate it, like its titular hero, to its perpetual place in the shade. But the book, like professor William Stoner, isn’t out to win popularity contests. It endures, illumined from within. —Tim Kreider, The New Yorker

Stoner is written in the most plainspoken of styles… Its hero is an obscure academic who endures a series of personal and professional agonies. Yet the novel is utterly riveting, and for one simple reason: because the author, John Williams, treats his characters with such tender and ruthless honesty that we cannot help but love them. —Steve Almond, Tin House

The best book I read in 2007 was Stoner by John Williams. It’s perhaps the best book I’ve read in years. —Stephen Elliott, The Believer

John Williams’s Stoner is something rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away. —Morris Dickstein, The New York Times Book Review

Stoner by John Williams, contains what is no doubt my favorite literary romance of all time. William Stoner is well into his 40s, and mired in an unhappy marriage, when he meets Katherine, another shy professor of literature. The affair that ensues is described with a beauty so fierce that it takes my breath away each time I read it. The chapters devoted to this romance are both terribly sexy and profoundly wise. — The Christian Science Monitor

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“Solving murders. It’s a family business,” is the provocative descriptor for Richard Osman’s new series. Osman has created a new world for lovers of his special brand of mystery. The family consists of a father-in-law, his daughter-in-law and his son. Meet Steve Wheeler, a retired policeman and a widower who lives in Axley, a fictional small town that nudges up against the New Forest in southern England: “The forest is the whole point of the place. The village itself simply found itself a small clearing and settled in.” He does a spot of investigating but mostly he follows his well-trodden routines—a daily walk, a weekly pub quiz, and taking care of his cat Trouble. Other than his dead wife Debbie, with whom he “speaks” to daily by leaving messages on his Dictaphone, Steve’s closest confidant is his daughter-in-law, Amy. Like Debbie, Amy is strong and sensible, a person who embraces life and doesn’t shy away from challenges.

Amy’s life has all the adrenaline a person could want. She does private security at an elite level. Right now, she’s protecting a world-famous author, Rosie D’Antonio who has received a death threat. Rosie is richer than rich, and she’s outlived many a friend and lover. 

It’s not the most exciting job Amy has ever had, but it’s sunny, and she likes the client. Rosie D’Antonio, the world’s bestselling novelist, “if you don’t count Lee Child.” Her Spanish-style mansion on her own private island just off the coast of South Carolina. With her own personal chef.

It’s a copacetic assignment for Amy, until it isn’t. Andrew Fairbanks, an Instagram influencer, is found dead on a yacht in the Caribbean, with a bag full of cash beside him. It’s nothing to do with Amy until the former Navy SEAL turned personal chef tries to assassinate her. Why is someone trying to tie her to viral executions with an Instagram twist? Don’t mess with Amy. She and Rosie Amy escape the island. Their plan is to get out of Dodge by flying away on Rosie’s plane, but they have no doubt the assassination attempts will continue. Not to mention the reason Amy is protecting Rosie in the first place—a Russian is trying to kill her. Amy needs reinforcements stat, in the person of her father-in-law Steve. Reading the peregrinations Steve goes through before he is finally persuaded to fly to America is laugh-out-loud funny. This is a guy who barely leaves Axley.

“Look, I can’t promise you,” says Steve, “but I could look into flights on the computer? See if I can get a cheap deal next week? Maybe you’ll have solved it by then?”   “There’ll be a plane waiting for you at Farnborough,” says Amy. “Rosie’s private jet.”   “Give over,” says Steve. “Farnborough. Is there parking?”   “A car will come to your house. It’ll drive you to the plane.”   “Wait a minute,” says Steve.   “I need you, Steve,” says Amy. “Get the plane.”   “I’ll have to mull it ov—”   “What would Debbie tell you to do?”   Steve knows exactly what Debbie would tell him to do. She’s telling him right now. He feels sick. But then he realizes there’s another feeling too. One that he can’t quite put his finger on. Surely not excitement? At being wanted? At being needed? At danger? No, he must be in shock.   “Are there alligators?”   Steve hears Amy put this question to Rosie, who replies, “God, yes, huge ones.”

Righty-ho! What more does Steve need? Perhaps a personal explanation from Amy, who tells him she needs “someone I can trust.” “There are murders to be solved, and I can’t do it by myself. It’s you and me.” Readers will crack a rueful smile when they read Steve’s answer: “But we don’t solve murders.” 

Rosie and Steve get on like a house on fire. Rosie likes Steve so much she foregoes the pleasure of adding him to her endless list of conquests. Sometimes a lady just needs a friend. Curiosity about Rosie’s age is a running joke in We Solve Murders . She bemoans the fact that at her age she has “fewer friends.”

“People die,” says Steve.   “And a lot more people die when you get to my age,” says Rosie.   “Remind me what age that is again?” asks Steve.   “Thirty years younger than my first husband,” says Rosie. “And thirty years older than my next husband.”

Complaints notwithstanding, there’s a lot of life left in the old girl—the ageless Joan Collins might be a good actor to play Rosie.  

We Solve Murders is grittier, and in some ways, a more grounded mystery than The Thursday Murder Club series but then again, Rosie owns her own plane. No more comparisons, except to say that Osman has a deft hand at finding the perfect phrase or action to describe someone. His writing is a rare treat—I can’t wait for the next adventure of Steve, Amy, and Rosie and the cast of characters they collect around them. Perhaps, like me, you are worried about “the further adventures of a gang of friends called Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron.” Have no fear, Osman assures us that “they’ve enjoyed their year off and are ready for a few more murders.”

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