I watched this and immediately wanted to share it because it captured my feelings towards this book so well. Clifford Lee Sargent does such an awesome job describing what’s damn perfect about this novel.
John Williams – Stoner BOOK REVIEW [Better Than Food: Book Reviews]
Published
Some Ferrett Notes 
Stoner is neither the work of an original mind or stylist. Rather, it is a pastiche of much better writers – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson – straining and failing to come alive as real, lived experience on every page. In other words, a competently written academic novel written by an academic. Carefully re-read passages at random in this plodding, lifeless book and you’ll find much imprecise writing at odds with itself, and muddled thoughts reaching for great effect but void of specific meaning: “As his mind engaged itself with its subject, as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied and tried to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant change within himself; and as he was aware of that, he moved outward from himself into the world which contained him.” Huh? All dressed up with absolutely nowhere to go. Why? Because Williams writes with a style (or several) in mind without forging one from his own unique lived experience. Stoner can’t get out alive from the few lines quoted above, and throughout the book, because the words on the page are essentially not about him or anyone – they are about writing itself. And primarily, other writers at that.
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