"Stoner" by John Williams *****

• Book Club Selection, January 2014
• US author, long time professor at University of Denver
• Originally published in 1965
• Setting:  Missouri, roughly 1891-1956
• Characters:  William Stoner (protagonist), Edith ( his wife), Grace (his daughter), Dave Masters & Gordon Finch (university friends), Hollis Lomax (his arch enemy), Archer Sloane (his mentor and role model)
• p.4..."At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to stoop beneath the weight of his occupation
• p.16..."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."...the moment he discovered his love of literature
• Archer Sloane, the Department Chairperson 'knew' who Stoner was, recognized himself in him...a teacher
• p.31..."And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm.  It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear."...this from Dave Masters, who then went and died in WWI
• p.36..."The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build." ...this from Sloane when faculty are deciding whether to enlist
• p.36...."He had never got in the habit of introspection, and he found the task of searching his motives a difficult and slightly distasteful one; he felt that he had little to offer to himself and that there was little within him which he could find
• p.43..."He never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there."..poignant
• p.100..."As  he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture--as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible."...How I felt moving into and decorating my own home at 55
• p.113..."He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man.  It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence."...this is me
• p.194...."In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him:  that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another." how true!
• p.195...."Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."...CENTRAL THEME OF THE NOVEL
• Don't understand concept of "given opinion"....p.199
• p.219..."Though he seldom though of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak."
• p.220..."As Archer Sloane had done, he realized the futility and wast of committing one's self wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world toward its unknown end..."
• p.243..."It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it."...his daughter's wedding
• p.250...entire paragraph about having given his love throughout his life in a manner saying, "Look!  I am alive.".......
• p.250..."H saw the sickness of the world and of his own country during the years after the great war, the hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war, marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare.  And the pity and sadness he felt were so old, so much a part of his age that he seemed to himself nearly untouched.".....
• Review:  Reading this deceptively straightforward novel was an unexpected pleasure.  The plot is simple, telling the tale of one man's life.  A simple university professor's life.  To me the profound aspect of this novel stems from the brilliant tale of becoming.  Stoner "becomes" in the context of growing up on a farm, living through WWI, the Depression, and WWII.  He "becomes" because of his experiences of various forms of love, with wife, lover, and child. He "becomes" within the context of university politics.  Most of his life is spent in the inner world of his mind, while the outer world tends to both bewilder and horrify him.  My hunch is that this reading experience may bore some, while it may profoundly impact others.  For me, it is strongly reminiscent of the experience of reading Albert Camus' "The Stranger".  This one will stay with me for quite a while!