Stoner, read again

The second reading is quieter than the first, and somehow it is not a sad book any more.

The first time I read John Williams’s Stoner I thought it was one of the saddest books I had ever read. A farm boy becomes an English professor at a minor university, makes a difficult marriage, has a modest career, and dies. The opening pages tell you, more or less, that nobody remembers him.

Reading it again this month, I found a different book. Not a sad one, exactly. A book about attention: a man who keeps doing the work in front of him, carefully and without much reward, while everything around him changes. His real life is not in the events. It is in the hours he spends reading and teaching, in the love of a subject that never once loves him back in any visible way.

Williams writes in plain, clear sentences that never ask you to feel anything. That restraint is the whole trick. Because the book refuses to tell you that Stoner’s life mattered, you end up insisting on it yourself.

I finished it on a Sunday, closed it, and went for a long walk. Some books send you out of the house. This one sent me out to look at ordinary things a little more carefully, which is about the best thing I can say of any novel.