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Mar 12, 2016
I'll skip the summary since there is a nice one from the publisher on this page. The novel has been categorized as an academic novel and early in the book I thought it didn’t matter what the professional setting was since there are similar politics in any profession. Later, though, I realized that William Stoner not only had to be cast as a teacher but his subject had to be English—Williams uses the book to make a statement on literature’s potential. While studying literature in college, Stoner"would feel that he was out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoken to him [about the 73rd sonnet]. 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." Those moments of otherness, standing outside of time, happen a few times in the book and, in addition to communing with those no longer living, provide a balm to Stoner. Just as Stoner explains to his students that there is poetry in grammar and other places we don’t expect, Williams shows there is poetry within moments of our life we don’t anticipate. These moments keep Stoner’s life from being tragic, even when the moment is something as simple as his daughter’s face absorbing the light in his study while he worked. With Stoner, John Williams makes good on equating the study of literature and language with investigating the mystery of the mind and heart.