Our Father which art in heaven, give us this morning something to do. To walk in the park.

To speak about an American writer I am coming to admire, I want to tell you about two books. Stoner filled my head last summer and I've dubbed it the perfect novel. This morning I read chapter two of Nothing but the Night where the quote above is found.

Stoner

I looked through my posts and was surprised I hadn't mentioned Stoner yet. Wouldn't you think that once an avid reader had found the perfect novel, she wouldn't shut up about it? Well, no time like the present. I came across this book through a Youtube video where another avid reader discussed it in much the same way I am now. This is the one and only time I took a recommendation from Youtube, that's not my usual style (because reading is v serious and personal and I like to wander a library to let any title speak to me from the shelves). I couldn't relocate this video, unfortunately, but it was the way this guy talked about it that signaled to me the singularity of this novel. I wondered why it hadn't been part of my survey of American Literature education (it really should have been).

Stoner is the perfect novel because it tells a complete story, the beginning to the end of a man's life, a life that was not extraordinary, yet within it is found all the excruciating beauty and pain that we know in our personal narratives, that we hope is universal. If it is universal, then we are one. And I believe that anything we create should seek to prove this. Williams did it fantastically well, and so he should be admired.

Williams central character William Stoner becomes a Professor of English. Is there a lonelier creature? Sure, certainly there is. But this is where my own love of literature colors the book rosy. Experiences I had personally inhabited in my college years (and on the occasion these days when I have the lucky happenstance of a literary moment) leapt off the pages like a magic spell of understanding had been cast on me. John Williams knows what I know, what I've found in books. Academia did not bless either of us for having discovered that real and true magic. What lonely disciples we are.

The final scene of Stoner is, to me, up there with scenes from the bible. Miraculous. I hope you read it. The moment I read it will be a very dear moment to me forever.

Nothing but the Night

Williams first novel is depressing, but eloquently so. Like I mentioned, I've read only through two chapters, but, yes I think what he's doing is making depression beautiful. It's a bit like what I could stereotype today as a third year film student's solipsistic fever dream, but still, aren't those sometimes rather interesting? If you're a lost young man, I think in this book you'll find that John Williams has your number. It's pretty short, just above 100 pages. Though the content is of a banal flavor, the language is compelling, the character is endearing. The first chapter very much moved me, and makes it clear that Williams has a unique talent.

The copy I've borrowed from the library includes at the end an interview with John Williams' widow. Here's a portion of that:

PR: Actually he wanted to choose a motto for Stoner, a line by Ortega y Gasset, in the end he didn't use it, but the line was: "A hero is a man who wants to be himself." What would that have meant for him personally?

NW: That's really central and getting right into it, isn't it? Well, look how much is standing in the way of our being ourselves. Our circumstances, in John's case it was poverty. In this context John came as close to succeeding as anybody I have ever met. He did what he wanted to do. I mean, even though he couldn't start writing until he was in his thirties, he damn well started. So he came as close as anyone I can imagine to becoming himself, and to be willing to make whatever sacrifice or to face whatever challenge. He just kept going.

Don't we admire this in people when we see it? That a person wants to go after becoming who they are, and does not make an excuse for it, does not cower under the pressure of performing it. And when that person is a writer, that's magic.

John Williams was dead before I was born, but when I read him, I know there is something very real, a life essence, that we have both partaken in.

This is entirely my interpretation, but if you read these books, perhaps they might say to you:
Drink the living water of the written word, and go be alive!!