Stoner
A quiet man lives a quiet life. That is the whole plot. Published in 1965 to no attention, rediscovered decades later by European readers, Stoner is the novel about an ordinary life that turns out to be extraordinary. Williams wrote with such plain, patient precision that the final pages feel like losing someone you know.
"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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
