Stoner by John Williams

Just beautiful.

After going into this quiet little novel almost blind — I wasn't sure what to expect. But I was quickly won over by the calm, steady hand guiding the story of an ordinary man living the life he was given and the life he was able to choose.

The novel opens with William Stoner first attending the University of Missouri in 1910 under the intent of studying agriculture so that he might learn about the advancements to better assist his farming family. However, there in a standard literature class, Stoner's love for academia and literary studies opens up. He changes his major, dropping the agricultural programs, and focuses on the humanities. His life — as a student and then a professor — is lived quietly, humbly, and rather passively. But the gentle nature of the story, a character study of one man's life, is an exploration of the precious wonder to be found in the unremarkable.

I found it extraordinarily interesting that a man living in one of the most turbulent decades in modern history of the United States sits down to write a book about the life of this man whose years lead right up to where Williams sat writing this novel. Stoner's life as an adult spans from just before World War I (and presumably into the 1918 Flu pandemic, but that's not mentioned at all — astounding to be left out of so many books) through Prohibition and the Great Depression, followed by World War II, the Korean War, and the beginnings of the Vietnam War and into the author's present day decade.

The idea to cover what life was like for the generation that came before — and to do it so delicately — and to inject so much warmth and emotion into this novel, published on the outside cusp of the mid-century range, when so many novels were emotionally closed off, angry, and overtly misogynistic — is a beautiful and astounding feat.

An almost perfect novel, this one feels like a The Remains of the Day of its time.