Stoner

⚖The case for it

A professor reads a Shakespeare sonnet at a farm boy in a required survey course, and the silence that follows redirects an entire life. Williams builds everything from that hinge in prose kept deliberately flat, and the flatness accumulates. "Quite possibly the saddest novel I've ever read," says one reader, and the sadness is earned by ordinary means: a marriage, a career, decades of being boxed in, one stretch of happiness with Katherine Driscoll banked by disappointment on both sides. The department war with Lomax runs as tense as any thriller. "A quietly beautiful book," the shortest reviews agree, and the novel opens with his obituary and spends the rest proving it wrong.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"Stoner does nothing." His wife campaigns to separate him from his daughter and he watches; his career gets throttled and he endures. What the book calls dignity, one reader calls "the indolence which prevents him from divorcing his wife," and the bill goes to his daughter and his lover. Edith, meanwhile, "hardly exceeds the caricature image of the neurotic frigid female," one half of a schema another review nails as "Edith, the fantasy of martyrdom, and Katherine, the fantasy of sex." A bedroom scene narrated as tenderness describes him starting sex with a woman half asleep, and the narration never blinks. "Not every classic deserves to be one." The back half leaves readers drained for days.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings