Stoner

Somehow I can’t grasp what went wrong in Professor Stoner’s life. University education had lifted him from farmland to campus. He loved the subject studied, and married the most beautiful woman who had blown his mind. But then the family did not work out.

All hatred occured for a reason. What made Edith to behave like that to husband and daugther? Why would she ease out when Stoner had a love affair? Sometimes people do act like that, insisting on creating misery for themselves and everyone in the vicinity. That’s why the world is such an imperfect place.

Sonnet 73

by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long. 

iambic pentameter

The line is divided into five feet (the basic unit of poetic measurement), each one consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable:

That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold

Review 

John Stoner, born in 1891, grows up on a farm in Missouri with parents who hardly ever speak. He gets a scholarship to study agronomy at the University of Missouri and, upon graduating, haltingly explains to them that he has switched his major to English. Literature is to him a mystifying tangle of words but a seductive one. Stoner becomes an English professor at the same university. He has few friends and one enemy, an administrator. After an altercation, they don’t speak for 20 years. When Stoner finally finds someone he can talk to (not his wife), his nemesis sees to it that the relationship comes to an end.

“Stoner” was published in 1965 to favourable reviews and poor sales. It remained obscure until the early 2000s, when it was republished and prominent authors like Ian McEwan discovered and publicised it. The novel dangles and rejects American clichés: desiring a better life for one’s children; holding on to impossible hope; overcoming adversity; acting on a heroic patriotism. In their place are mundane realities: a failed marriage; an alienated family; mid-level ambition; fear of death in battle. Yet Stoner’s quiet life, lived amid loud American dreams and loud American disappointments, turns out to be a rich one. In John Williams’s poignant telling he is sort of an American hero.

Source: The Economist’s Culture section