Status Updates From Stoner

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”

Chapter 2 done. Dave Masters’ irreverent wit lights up the page—his “library or whorehouse” jab at Stoner had me laughing out loud. Yet beneath the banter lies insight: friends see the “lean and hungry” devotion in Stoner that he can’t see in himself. Sloane’s desperate plea against the war gave me chills; his belief in the quiet, unrecorded victories of the human spirit feels like the novel’s beating heart.