*STONER* by John Williams

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

*This book was so beautifully written that I hated finishing it. The kind of lyrical prose that makes reading such a pleasure is contained in this book. I found the story to be very sad, but I loved the characters immediately. I fell in love with the character of William Stoner immediately and deep within my heart, wished that his life could have been happier. Shear pleasure in reading rates this a 5 out of 5. It made me realize the different paths that people take, versus the path that they could have chosen. William Stoner loved literature and teaching so much that he chose his own path and not the one his parents had destined him to. His wife and his daughter were both a disappointment to me, but Stoner was able to deal with it and carry on with his love of literature and teaching. I wish he could have ended up with Katherine Driscoll, but this was a different time, a different place and a different world so he could not. I will always remember this book as being among the finest I have had the pleasure of reading.