Stoner
A Novel
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4.4 • 48 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor is one of the great rediscovered modern classics.
'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.
Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.
'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick Hornby
'A terrific novel of echoing sadness' Julian Barnes
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This reprint of Williams's remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose. Sent by his hard-scrabble farmer father to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, William Stoner is sidetracked by an obsessive love of literature and stimulated by a curmudgeonly old professor, Archer Sloane. Sloane helps Stoner avoid service in WWI, and Stoner eventually becomes an assistant professor. He then meets and marries a St. Louis beauty, Edith, who quickly subjugates her contemplative, passive husband. As decades pass, Stoner entrenches himself deep into the life of the mind, developing into a master teacher but never finding solace in the outside world. Stoner's single joy is Grace, their daughter, whom Edith appropriates as a weapon in her very personal war against Stoner's quest for inner peace. Williams (1922 1994) won the NBA for Augustus (1973), and NYRB will republish his western, Butch's Crossing next year. Williams's prose flows in a smooth, efficient current that demands contemplation.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful Wanderings
Beautiful prose. Honouring the educators and educated. A privilege to read.
STONER
STONER, by John Williams is the most fascinating read I have undertaken so far this year. The text is written with a force of momentum that belies its casual intimacy. You feel immediately drawn into the personal experience of the young Stoner as he enters into a world of learning that Williams describes with perfect portrayal. Williams' characterizations of the individuals who populate the cloistered world of the University is masterful. The observations of the world from Stoner's perspective that Williams draws are succinct and poignant. The passage of years (decades) never seems rushed, while the dwelling on a defined period of months or a season does not drag. The relationship between Stoner and his wife Edith, is heart rending in its pure negativeness. A negativeness that Stoner just accepts with a casual stoicness that at times makes you furious, but you simply accept because, you empathize with Stoner so thoroughly.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Is this the finality that we all confront? Perhaps, perhaps not. This is a sad book, a book that draws you along with a glum sense of finality, a conclusion which you know is not a happy one but is even more sad because of its loneliness.
If you read no other modern American writer this year, take the time and make it a must to read John Williams' STONER.