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In Five Books of Professors<\/a>, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:<\/span><\/p>\n (4.) John Williams, Stoner<\/em> (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal\u2014a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar\u2014but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n "Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget. For more by Myers on Stoner<\/em>, see here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives." Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n What is the difference between the philosopher and the novelist? Perhaps this: the philosopher tries but fails to articulate the Impersonal Ineffable; the novelist tries but fails to articulate the Personal Ineffable, the 'inside' of a person's life, the felt quality of it. In both cases, there is the attempt to speak the Unspeakable.<\/span><\/p>\n Two very different uses of language and thought in a reach for what is Unreachable by those routes. And perhaps by any route. Put that it in your pipe, John Anderson. And smoke it. Companion post: John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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