A writer in the New Yorker called John Williams the "author of the greatest American novel you've never heard of." They were referring to John Williams's Stoner, but equally if not more important in ...our era is Butcher's Crossing. Usually classified as a Western, it is a scathing indictment of the toxic masculinity and Emersonian egotism that drove men west to "find themselves" through conquest, in this case the brutal destruction of the American buffalo. Williams's chronicle of a bloody autumn of slaughter should stand alongside Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as one of the great works of American environmental writing.
I argue that given a plausible reading of John Williams’s
(2012 1965) the novel throws light on the demands and costs of pursuing a strategy for self-realisation along Platonic lines which seeks ...unification through the adoption of a single exclusive end in a manner that emulates the Socratic maieutic teacher. The novel does not explicitly argue either for or against such a strategy but rather vividly depicts its difficulties, appeal, and limitations, thus leaving the ultimate evaluation up to the reader.
The classic case of a novel extolled as a classic yet still ignored is John Williams's Stoner (1965). And whatever the explanation for its mild recent success (surprisingly greater in Europe than the ...US), the one continuing theme in appraisals on both sides of the pond is the misplaced sentiment advanced in its favor, of a novel that poignantly evokes a desolate professorial life. Here, Mitchell examines Williams's transformative style in Stoner.
Since the turn of the millennium the tale of an altruistic professor, William Stoner, whose life is scuttled by an unhappy marriage, has built up a dedicated following of “Stonerites” and sold ...hundreds of thousands of re-issued copies. The man himself emerges as a complex character whose experience as a flight radio operator in Myanmar during the second world war left him “sometimes plagued by bad dreams or periods of cold sweats from the effects of malaria.” The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life , by Charles J Shields, The University of Texas Press, RRP£22.99, 320 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe.
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