![]() ![]() Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. And so Stoner breaks into consciousness: “He had no friends, and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. The bewilderment he feels that day in the classroom leads him to switch his major to English. He had taken the land, his lessons, his chores, even his life, merely as blunt facts of existence, and stood dumb before them. As a boy and young man Stoner had never before considered what something meant, including his own life. That day in Sloan’s classroom is pivotal. Williams performs this feat by attending carefully to the soul of William Stoner and the tragic circumstances of his life. In nearly fifty years of reading fiction, I have never encountered a more powerful novel-and not a syllable of it sentimental. When he spoke again, this man, whom I had known as a rigorous critic, could only bring himself to say, “I hope you’ll read this novel.” At this point my former professor’s eyes welled up with tears, and he could say nothing more. He tries again and then falls into silence. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Professor Sloan calls on several students, but gets no answer. One day, while discussing Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, “That Time of Year Thou Mayest in Me Behold,” the professor asks the class what the sonnet means. In his sophomore year, he is required to take a semester survey of English literature. Only by the chance suggestion of a county agent does he find himself in a pinched existence majoring in agricultural science at the university. The protagonist, William Stoner, has grown up at the turn of the twentieth century on a hardscrabble Missouri farm. I hadn’t, so he began laying out the story. The second time we met over dinner he asked if I had read Williams’s novel Stoner. ![]() I remembered him as an incisive and demanding literary critic. In 1998 I looked up the man under whom I had studied romantic poetry a quarter-century earlier. I read John Williams’s novel Stoner (1965) thirty-three years after it was published, having come to it in a singular way-through the tears of a rigorous literary critic. ![]()
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