Stoner

"Have you read Stoner by John Williams? He's thought about it too and I think you might like it."

"This book begins in a similar way to O Pioneers! , with a hardscrabble farm in the same part of the world. It was set at the end of the 19th century and has nothing to do with being stoned. A lot of people think, “This is a novel about drugs.” It is not at all! It is about a young man, William Stoner, who goes off to university at great financial cost and deprivation to his father, who is a pioneer farmer. The boy goes off to agricultural college and this is seen as a great triumph. But while he is there he encounters literature for the first time, specifically a Shakespearian sonnet, and is transformed by reading it. He decides he doesn’t want to study agriculture at all, and we see him become a professor of literature. It is tempting to think that this is an academic novel with all its trials and tribulations, but it is not that either. It is a much more tender thing. It is a novel based essentially on disappointment, because Stoner has a rotten marriage and a terrible time academically. But he carries on and develops an intense affection for his now much more modest life. It is a story of intellectual determination and the ability of a man to find love simply in what he does. It is a book about love of learning. I don’t want to give it all away, but he does find true love with a woman towards the end of his life, so in the end there is great blessing and happiness. To me, Stoner is almost the perfect novel. It is very little known but anyone who reads it is completely captivated by it. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. I do, to be perfectly honest. There are novels which show some ossification of social stratification in America, and in cities like Boston it is rampant. But generally I would say that there is a lot more social mobility in this country than in Britain. It is one of the reasons why I find there is a much greater degree of opportunity for someone like me than back in my home country of the UK. I have become a citizen of the United States, and while I am in no way disdainful of Britain and enormously affectionate of it, I am pleased that I am an American."

"Books like John Williams's Stoner are the books I find stay with me longest and cut deepest."

"I'm glued to my reading chair by quieter novels like Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" or John Williams's "Stoner.""

"I have two old reliables that I go back to again and again — 'Stoner,' by John Williams, and 'The Meadow,' by James Galvin."

""Stoner," by John Williams"

"For me literature is most effective when it's sort of plain. I think of how much I love the book Stoner, by John Williams."

"which I'm desperate to make into a movie"

"John Williams's "Stoner""

"Another recommendation from Jamie Lee Curtis, who says it is a perfect novel. I think I may agree, though I have only just read the prologue."

"There were episodes in "Stoner," by John Williams, that were inexpressibly tear-making too."

"A perfect book. This tale of a Missouri farmer’s embrace of a life of letters is spare and yet full of emotional detail and longing."