Book Review: Stoner reads like a biography, it's a literary portrait. A life to read and watch and learn what life is about. Here everyone is distant from others, there are emotions, but hidden and controlled and masked by distances. No one wholly bad or wholly good. While reading I thought of The Secret History and felt that Stoner was somehow the opposite of that book. The humble man of the earth discovers literature at college, and becomes what he has to be, even at pain and cost to others. "He wondered at the foolishness that drove men to do the things they did." This is a simple life, not much different really than the lives that many people live. Not much success, not much failure, a lot of making the best of it and learning in between, dealing with the obstacles. "He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something -- even pain -- to pierce him, to bring him alive." John Williams (1922-1994) tries to create a real and credible life story. In any life, we mostly try to do the best we can, there are moments of happiness, sorrow, terror, disappointment, and of what might have been. There's confusion and events that don't make much sense. We try to do what we want to do, and sometimes we find value in what we do. We don't achieve as much as we want, and we're not always as good as we imagine ourselves. Williams catches all of that in Stoner. Although written from a man's point of view, the novel is full of women, and the reader will puzzle over the wife, pity the daughter, and hope for the lover. "They had been brought up ... that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate." We're left with the story of a long enough life that wasn't easy, wasn't meant to be. But it was the life he had, interwoven with the lives of others. The salt of the earth from one family to another, reading his literature, teaching his students. Life and life only. [5★]
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