Stoner by John Williams – review

Faced with a book as simple and true as Stoner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of intentional fallacy. It is the portrait of a quiet farm boy, who receives his Doctorate of Philosophy, teaches literature at the University of Missouri, then dies at the age of sixty-five. His colleagues hold him in no particular esteem. We know all this from the first page.

This story of hard graft without recognition, gratifyingly, for literary sleuths, has parallels with the author’s life and the reception of his work. John Williams’ grandparents were farmers and, after completing his PhD in Missouri, he taught at the University of Denver for the following three decades.  First published in 1965, despite a glowing mention in the New Yorker, Stoner only sold about 2,000 copies. His next, a novel made up of the correspondence, documents and personal reflections of the emperor Augustus, earned him brief notoriety because it shared the National Book Award with John Barth’s Chimera – the first instance of a hung jury in the prize’s history.