THE PERFECT NOVEL — Stoner, John Williams. Book Review.
New York Times was correct. This book is perfect. Down to the very last detail. The prose. The humility. Hope. Sadness. Youth. Age. Revelations. You can tell by the way it reads, with such clarity, that this book is an authentic imprint of the authors mysterious life. And when I finished the book after three sittings, I picked it straight back up, read it again, underlined every other line, annotated it, dreamed of becoming a literature teacher who had the pleasure of getting paid to read, and went back to the story again. It’s that bloody good. The perfect novel for both the writer and the reader.
When somebody first explained the book to me, a story about a university professor. I shut off. I was not interested. The only reason I picked this book up was because I thought the professor was a literal stoner. He was not. Before reading this book, University had never interested me, most likely because I never went. And…
