Stoner

by John Williams

Soon after their daughter is born, the child becomes the focus of the mother’s inner turmoil, her unresolved hatred of Stoner. If the portrait has a flaw, it is in its remorselessness, yet such is the clarity of the understanding that we come to accept it simply as the way things are, in the same way as the love affair becomes the way things ought to have been.

“Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance. Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself.” There are Stoner’s friends, the brilliant David Masters,

In a novel of brilliant portraits, that of Hollis Lomax is the most complex. Some of the scenes of conflict are almost unbearable in their intensity.

The novels are not only remarkable for their style but also for the diversity of their settings. No two novels are alike except for the clarity of the prose; they could easily pass for the work of four different writers. In the course of the

Then, more specifically, Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text “as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced

Wooley then suggests playfully, “It’s to be exegeted, in other words.” “Yes. As if it were a kind of puzzle.” “And literature is written to be entertaining?” Wooley suggests again, “Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid.”

prosodic

patterns of rythm and sound in language or poetry

In her white dress she was like a cold light coming into the room. Stoner started involuntarily toward

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly. He was both saddened and heartened by his discovery

dialectic.”

discussing the merits or truth of opinions

exegesis

He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

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.

He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt; given his own nature and the circumstance of his

She was, he knew—and had known very early, he supposed—one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for that it might be fulfilled. Alien to the world, it had to live where it could not be at home; avid for tenderness and quiet, it had to feed upon indifference and callousness and noise. It was a nature that, even in the strange and inimical place where it had to live, had not the savagery to fight off the brutal forces that opposed it and could only withdraw to a quietness where it was forlorn and small and gently still.

attrition

reducing the effectiveness or strength of something through constant attacks or contjnued pressure

They talked late into the night, as if they were old friends. And Stoner came to realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

is that really how you would feel when you learn that your daughter is an slcoholic - due mainly to her toxic upbringing - which your own weekness in not fighting for hrr contributed to??