Crazy Rich Asians- Kevin Kwan
I bought this at the Columbia University bookstore, and I have to say, it was one of the few times I was ever embarrassed to be seen with a book. Maybe I'd be less embarrassed if I weren't Asian. But moving on...
This is a book with shallow character development and shallow characters. It's a beach read, and a little bit of a middle finger to Austen, I think, to call it a "Pride and Prejudice-like send-up" (People magazine).
In summary, there are two royally frustrating elements of this book, the first being its hypocrisy. It claims to be a satire, and there are certainly mocking elements to it as well, but there is a strong undercurrent of admiration for these peoples' way of life. Second, the immaturity of its adult characters is dumbfounding, and it's a bit hilarious to see that the only person who is immune from said immaturity is the protagonist. Rachel Chu just can't seem to go wrong-- she's from a charmingly humble background, she's charmingly immune to materialism, she charmingly knew absolu-freaking-nothing about her 2-year boyfriend before she went on this trip (the reader is unsure as to what even makes Rachel and Nick so devoted to each other, except for the fact that they each think the other is smart, gorgeous, and not too Asian, whatever that means), she is charmingly unaware of how amazingly beautiful she is, and she is charmingly, incredibly intelligent and nice. It gets to be tiresome.
And about two-thirds of the way through, Kevin Kwan decides to blow to the winds the few ounces of verisimilitude he had left, by concocting a life story for Rachel Chu's mother (involving an incredibly dramatic secret about Rachel's birth) that is reminiscent of a bad 1990's Korean soap opera. And, despite throwing in a few silly obstacles (like the fact that -- gasp -- Nick had a threesome a decade and a half ago when he was in his teens and modern woman Rachel can't seem to deal with that), Kwan ultimately can't help but to make his novel a Cinderella story.
The moral of Kwan's story?
If you're a beautiful Asian girl, you might be able to snag a beautiful Asian boy with a British accent, whose family will cut him off because you're not rich enough for them, but ultimately it won't matter because despite the fact that this book is money-obsessed (in a far from fully convincing satirical way), money doesn't matter and love triumphs over all.
Though I think Jessie J makes the same argument more poetically, and much more succinctly, in her song "Price Tag." ("It's not about the money, money, money," "Money can't buys us happiness" anyone?)
And anyway, you're secretly sure Nick has a number of properties and stock options already under his own name that won't make married life too shabby for you both.
This is a book with shallow character development and shallow characters. It's a beach read, and a little bit of a middle finger to Austen, I think, to call it a "Pride and Prejudice-like send-up" (People magazine).
In summary, there are two royally frustrating elements of this book, the first being its hypocrisy. It claims to be a satire, and there are certainly mocking elements to it as well, but there is a strong undercurrent of admiration for these peoples' way of life. Second, the immaturity of its adult characters is dumbfounding, and it's a bit hilarious to see that the only person who is immune from said immaturity is the protagonist. Rachel Chu just can't seem to go wrong-- she's from a charmingly humble background, she's charmingly immune to materialism, she charmingly knew absolu-freaking-nothing about her 2-year boyfriend before she went on this trip (the reader is unsure as to what even makes Rachel and Nick so devoted to each other, except for the fact that they each think the other is smart, gorgeous, and not too Asian, whatever that means), she is charmingly unaware of how amazingly beautiful she is, and she is charmingly, incredibly intelligent and nice. It gets to be tiresome.
And about two-thirds of the way through, Kevin Kwan decides to blow to the winds the few ounces of verisimilitude he had left, by concocting a life story for Rachel Chu's mother (involving an incredibly dramatic secret about Rachel's birth) that is reminiscent of a bad 1990's Korean soap opera. And, despite throwing in a few silly obstacles (like the fact that -- gasp -- Nick had a threesome a decade and a half ago when he was in his teens and modern woman Rachel can't seem to deal with that), Kwan ultimately can't help but to make his novel a Cinderella story.
The moral of Kwan's story?
If you're a beautiful Asian girl, you might be able to snag a beautiful Asian boy with a British accent, whose family will cut him off because you're not rich enough for them, but ultimately it won't matter because despite the fact that this book is money-obsessed (in a far from fully convincing satirical way), money doesn't matter and love triumphs over all.
Though I think Jessie J makes the same argument more poetically, and much more succinctly, in her song "Price Tag." ("It's not about the money, money, money," "Money can't buys us happiness" anyone?)
And anyway, you're secretly sure Nick has a number of properties and stock options already under his own name that won't make married life too shabby for you both.
Doctor Glas- by Hjalmar Söderberg
This stream-of-consciousness novel by Hjalmar Söderberg follows the thoughts of a 19th-century physician who falls quietly but desperately in love with a young, married woman. Doctor Glas commits what most would call the ultimate sin in order to free his beloved from a husband she despises. The murder is an essential element of the plot, but what is more central to this novel (and its literary significance) is the reasoning behind the crime. Glas is a man who asks questions that many protagonists have asked before, and in this thin volume of 150 pages, he manages to answer them- if not for all of us, at least for himself.
"The day will come, must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurably sick person- and every 'criminal' also- shall have the right to the doctor's help, if he wishes to be set free." -page 69
Doctor Glas reminded me distantly of The Dice Man's Luke Rhinehart. Both are men of medicine (one of the body and one of the mind, but nevertheless), and both disturbed by the irony of the occupations. Neither of them believes that he brings miracles to people's lives; both are aware that they only help people come to terms with their misery and drag along in life with a resigned tolerance. But Glas finds a simpler answer to human misery than the audacious Luke (founder of a new religion as he becomes). He arrives upon the conclusion that when death is the lesser evil than its alternative- a miserable life- we may have the right to make that choice. And being that the doctor's "duty" is to lessen misery, shouldn't it be his role to lessen misery wherever it can be lessened?
"When a child is born deformed, it is drowned." - page 75
Glas talks often about abortion. Many women (in fact he records every one of their visits) look to him to rid them of a burden they claim they cannot carry. Every single time, with no exception, he solemnly refuses. It comes from his professionalism- that is to say, the old words, like vomit, that always come up about his duty and oath as a doctor. But one day he makes a house call to a family, and discovers that the sick child is one that he was asked to abort many years ago. The child was born, and still is, an idiot, with an ugly face and beady, evil eyes (all this is as Glas describes him). And Glas thinks, perhaps it was his "duty" (ah, there's that ambiguous word again) to prevent this woman's life from being spoiled by this child, a child with a "loathsome, brutish face" of which his parents would love to be rid, but cannot because their cowardice impels them to be merciful, to keep up the appearances of love.
"There's nothing new under the sun!"
He could have been many things, Glas thinks. And yet he could not. He would have been a writer, yet he felt he could have nothing to write which others had not already written. There is nothing he has seen that others have not, nothing others have not yet decided to describe with eloquence. But the murder? Perhaps this is the one feat of originality Glas can muster. No one else knows of the clergyman's wife's secret pain, of the seed which grows daily in her womb, of her inevitable demise if no one "sets her free." Glas is truly the only one who can help her, at his own expense, and what a wonderful thing to give, for once, not just to receive! How courageous, spontaneous, all these things that no soul would ever use to describe the public Doctor Glas, a man of patterns and stagnancy!
Yet all things are more easily thought than done. And once thought, the choice tortures us.
"Choice is self-denial." - page 101
And God knows humans hate to deny themselves anything, even things which are opposites. We want, want, want pleasure yet we want, want, want to be forever safe in the role of a bystander. The state of having an open choice is most desirable to us- it is as if, for a brief moment, you can convince yourself that you might be able to have your cake and eat it too. But the clock ticks, and something in your body tells you that ultimately (how terrible the word!), there is only ever one course of action you can follow. You only ever live one life- at once, that is. And what is morality except an abstraction imposed upon us by others? Why is "duty" only invoked as something that ties us to others, not to ourselves?
Glas finds his answer in that which he thought would never again be possible for himself, in love.
"The day will come, must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurably sick person- and every 'criminal' also- shall have the right to the doctor's help, if he wishes to be set free." -page 69
Doctor Glas reminded me distantly of The Dice Man's Luke Rhinehart. Both are men of medicine (one of the body and one of the mind, but nevertheless), and both disturbed by the irony of the occupations. Neither of them believes that he brings miracles to people's lives; both are aware that they only help people come to terms with their misery and drag along in life with a resigned tolerance. But Glas finds a simpler answer to human misery than the audacious Luke (founder of a new religion as he becomes). He arrives upon the conclusion that when death is the lesser evil than its alternative- a miserable life- we may have the right to make that choice. And being that the doctor's "duty" is to lessen misery, shouldn't it be his role to lessen misery wherever it can be lessened?
"When a child is born deformed, it is drowned." - page 75
Glas talks often about abortion. Many women (in fact he records every one of their visits) look to him to rid them of a burden they claim they cannot carry. Every single time, with no exception, he solemnly refuses. It comes from his professionalism- that is to say, the old words, like vomit, that always come up about his duty and oath as a doctor. But one day he makes a house call to a family, and discovers that the sick child is one that he was asked to abort many years ago. The child was born, and still is, an idiot, with an ugly face and beady, evil eyes (all this is as Glas describes him). And Glas thinks, perhaps it was his "duty" (ah, there's that ambiguous word again) to prevent this woman's life from being spoiled by this child, a child with a "loathsome, brutish face" of which his parents would love to be rid, but cannot because their cowardice impels them to be merciful, to keep up the appearances of love.
"There's nothing new under the sun!"
He could have been many things, Glas thinks. And yet he could not. He would have been a writer, yet he felt he could have nothing to write which others had not already written. There is nothing he has seen that others have not, nothing others have not yet decided to describe with eloquence. But the murder? Perhaps this is the one feat of originality Glas can muster. No one else knows of the clergyman's wife's secret pain, of the seed which grows daily in her womb, of her inevitable demise if no one "sets her free." Glas is truly the only one who can help her, at his own expense, and what a wonderful thing to give, for once, not just to receive! How courageous, spontaneous, all these things that no soul would ever use to describe the public Doctor Glas, a man of patterns and stagnancy!
Yet all things are more easily thought than done. And once thought, the choice tortures us.
"Choice is self-denial." - page 101
And God knows humans hate to deny themselves anything, even things which are opposites. We want, want, want pleasure yet we want, want, want to be forever safe in the role of a bystander. The state of having an open choice is most desirable to us- it is as if, for a brief moment, you can convince yourself that you might be able to have your cake and eat it too. But the clock ticks, and something in your body tells you that ultimately (how terrible the word!), there is only ever one course of action you can follow. You only ever live one life- at once, that is. And what is morality except an abstraction imposed upon us by others? Why is "duty" only invoked as something that ties us to others, not to ourselves?
Glas finds his answer in that which he thought would never again be possible for himself, in love.
Sunken Red- by Jeroen Brouwers
Sunken Red, much like Camus' L'Étranger, begins with the death of the author's mother. Brouwers subsequently relays to us the scene of her death as he imagines it must have taken place, with all the emotion of a man discussing the passing of a next-door neighbor or an unremarkable obituary in the morning newspaper. Brouwers admits, without shame and very early on in the book, that he has long ceased to love his mother. She was the "most beautiful of mothers," "courageous," laughed often and with a generous spirit, and everything else that her son, now, is not, but there came a point at which Brouwers decided that she was his mother and she was not his mother. In later years, the two never saw each other and spoke only seldom over the phone.
Jeroen was the only thing his mother had, and his mother was the only thing Jeroen had. The pounding intensity of the sun in 1945 at the epicenter of world history, the curling waves of heat coming up from the sidewalk and sizzling on the skin of the women and children in Tjideng, the anger coming from the face and the spittle of Sone, the man whose backdrop was the Japanese flag, with its one red sun burning bloodily in a field of white, a reminder of the fate of many prisoners in Japanese concentration camps during WWII. These are all images that cause this unnamed pain in Brouwers' heart. The now middle-aged Jeroen finds a way to mitigate his anxiety attacks by taking pills with poetic names, but even the pills do not stop his face from melting away when he looks at his reflection in a window pane, like a wax mask in front of a fire.
The author often expresses his wish that he could go back, back into that same hole from which he came, back through the same place that was savagely kicked by the Japs when they discovered that Brouwers' mother had tried to hide handfuls of rice in her bra, even her panties.
He admits also that he decided to stay home when his beloved, beautiful wife was giving birth. He was unable to face a scene that would mark a "lasting injury to beauty," dooming a child to live in a world Jerowen knows to be filled with death and cruelty. He wishes, on behalf of the baby girl, that she could go back through that "hole-in-time" from which his own head once emerged, an occurrence for which he has never forgiven his mother- or, perhaps, himself.
When Brouwers witnesses his mother being beaten, the first thought that occurs to him is that he wants another, unbroken mother, someone other than the woman who risked death to salvage for him one real meal that does not consist of buburs. The buburs once reminded him of grey death, but now remind him of the flecks of dead skin he shaves off from his feet, which have long been as calloused as his heart. The absurdity of the violence and of the reality of death that he learned from age 3 to 5 is impossible to accept with a still-feeling heart. As an adult, no longer a desire to say good-bye to the mother he hated and loved for so long in a way that will let him be a little bit more at peace with himself.
Brouwers says that time does not heal all wounds. And so he considers it his duty to report the history he saw (which many others tried not to see), because most of the others who were with him are now dying deaths of mildness, and cannot deal with their pain in any other way than laughing it off, as if it means nothing because it is now in the past.
He claims also that he never reads his books after they are published. Once desperately written down, these memories are no longer a part of him, and he wants now only to forget them. This is only way Jeroen Brouwers can heal, not completely but just enough to live with himself again. This is the only way he can forget how he stood, rooted to the spot, while his mother and hundreds of other women were being built into the hot asphalt that had been the graves of many others before them. Through his writing, Brouwers has let himself walk away from that place in which he remained for so many years.
In the end, this book is a way of saying good-bye, not in that selfish way that people sometimes do just in order to feel closure, but in that way that wishes for the genuine happiness and prosperity of that person who is receding, slowly but surely, into the mist, knowing that one day you will follow.
Jeroen was the only thing his mother had, and his mother was the only thing Jeroen had. The pounding intensity of the sun in 1945 at the epicenter of world history, the curling waves of heat coming up from the sidewalk and sizzling on the skin of the women and children in Tjideng, the anger coming from the face and the spittle of Sone, the man whose backdrop was the Japanese flag, with its one red sun burning bloodily in a field of white, a reminder of the fate of many prisoners in Japanese concentration camps during WWII. These are all images that cause this unnamed pain in Brouwers' heart. The now middle-aged Jeroen finds a way to mitigate his anxiety attacks by taking pills with poetic names, but even the pills do not stop his face from melting away when he looks at his reflection in a window pane, like a wax mask in front of a fire.
The author often expresses his wish that he could go back, back into that same hole from which he came, back through the same place that was savagely kicked by the Japs when they discovered that Brouwers' mother had tried to hide handfuls of rice in her bra, even her panties.
He admits also that he decided to stay home when his beloved, beautiful wife was giving birth. He was unable to face a scene that would mark a "lasting injury to beauty," dooming a child to live in a world Jerowen knows to be filled with death and cruelty. He wishes, on behalf of the baby girl, that she could go back through that "hole-in-time" from which his own head once emerged, an occurrence for which he has never forgiven his mother- or, perhaps, himself.
When Brouwers witnesses his mother being beaten, the first thought that occurs to him is that he wants another, unbroken mother, someone other than the woman who risked death to salvage for him one real meal that does not consist of buburs. The buburs once reminded him of grey death, but now remind him of the flecks of dead skin he shaves off from his feet, which have long been as calloused as his heart. The absurdity of the violence and of the reality of death that he learned from age 3 to 5 is impossible to accept with a still-feeling heart. As an adult, no longer a desire to say good-bye to the mother he hated and loved for so long in a way that will let him be a little bit more at peace with himself.
Brouwers says that time does not heal all wounds. And so he considers it his duty to report the history he saw (which many others tried not to see), because most of the others who were with him are now dying deaths of mildness, and cannot deal with their pain in any other way than laughing it off, as if it means nothing because it is now in the past.
He claims also that he never reads his books after they are published. Once desperately written down, these memories are no longer a part of him, and he wants now only to forget them. This is only way Jeroen Brouwers can heal, not completely but just enough to live with himself again. This is the only way he can forget how he stood, rooted to the spot, while his mother and hundreds of other women were being built into the hot asphalt that had been the graves of many others before them. Through his writing, Brouwers has let himself walk away from that place in which he remained for so many years.
In the end, this book is a way of saying good-bye, not in that selfish way that people sometimes do just in order to feel closure, but in that way that wishes for the genuine happiness and prosperity of that person who is receding, slowly but surely, into the mist, knowing that one day you will follow.
The Dice Man- by Luke Rhinehart
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart is a rollicking satire of human beings and their inherent belief that they have control over their own fate- and the more control, the better.
Baudelaire once said that ennui is man's greatest enemy- a sentiment with which Luke Rhinehart, the protagonist, certainly agrees at the beginning of the book. He is a psychotherapist who is exhausted by the "listen, don't judge, and echo" routine of his sessions with his patients. He begins to tire of his life of comfort, wealth, and success (put that way, he seems to be a little bit of an asshole, and sometimes, he truly is). Luke believes that miserable patients should be helped to escape their misery once and for all, not to resign themselves to that "inescapable" reality. He wishes that people would stop scorning and suppressing the multiple personalities that lie dormant within man, pressuring him to choose that one that is most appropriate and likely to succeed in our structured society, and settle down into a routine of mundanity.
And then Luke discovers the power of the Dice.
But unlike many other people who have read this book and (oh so generously) shared their thoughts online, I don't believe that Luke Rhinehart is trying to encourage his readers to lead a life of irresponsibility, misogyny, and unprovoked violence justified by means of a quack religion (though all are described in the course of his erratic plot). I don't think Rhinehart is trying to seriously offer a solution to human ennui, or even that The Dice Man intended to be a text with any psychoanalytical credibility. I read this as a satire, and interpreted it as such.
If there is one valuable and realistically applicable lesson the Diceman gives us, it is that we should not take for granted a life in which we are neither content nor discontent, going through the motions of living but not really doing a single thing that is outside of others' expectations for us. Luke Rhinehart is right to question what happens to us between the ages of 2 and 32 to make us so damn boring, so resigned to the "way things are." And though none (or very few) of us will be courageous (and foolish!) enough to try to explore the limitless possibilities of man in the way that Dr. Rhinehart does, this novel is an interesting ride in an alternate reality that observes what would happen if we truly did leave things up to chance. Because let's face it- we usually break ourselves and sometimes others trying not to.
Something interesting to consider is that Rhinehart manages to take an idea of value and take it somewhere it didn't need to be taken.
I will agree with Rhinehart in this: A man is not one person. We have many tendencies and quirks of the personality, some which we embrace more than others. But I disagree with Rhinehart in that I think society actually encourages our tendency towards multiple personalities. Different people and different interactions unlock different selves outside of our usual "Selves," so that in the end, we are different versions of ourselves in the presence of different people. In order to survive in this society that Lukehart claims to detest, we have to be students for our teachers, children for our parents, lovers for our lovers, and a mix of it all for ourselves. I think what Luke did not realize was that he was already "role-playing" in his "normal life" long before the Dice Man and Dice Centers existed. Perhaps the "rapist" (I'm not even going to get into his '70s, incorrect use of the verb "rape") in us who wants to commit adultery never (or almost never) gets full reign, but this does not diminish the fact that plenty of other personalities and roles inhabit our bodies and minds at once, all squabbling to get out. In a lot of ways, Rhinehart seemed to me a man desperate to find something that had already been sitting right in front of him for many, many years. And then he couldn't go back for fear of reneging on the promise that has come to be his life and religion: the Dice.
Baudelaire once said that ennui is man's greatest enemy- a sentiment with which Luke Rhinehart, the protagonist, certainly agrees at the beginning of the book. He is a psychotherapist who is exhausted by the "listen, don't judge, and echo" routine of his sessions with his patients. He begins to tire of his life of comfort, wealth, and success (put that way, he seems to be a little bit of an asshole, and sometimes, he truly is). Luke believes that miserable patients should be helped to escape their misery once and for all, not to resign themselves to that "inescapable" reality. He wishes that people would stop scorning and suppressing the multiple personalities that lie dormant within man, pressuring him to choose that one that is most appropriate and likely to succeed in our structured society, and settle down into a routine of mundanity.
And then Luke discovers the power of the Dice.
But unlike many other people who have read this book and (oh so generously) shared their thoughts online, I don't believe that Luke Rhinehart is trying to encourage his readers to lead a life of irresponsibility, misogyny, and unprovoked violence justified by means of a quack religion (though all are described in the course of his erratic plot). I don't think Rhinehart is trying to seriously offer a solution to human ennui, or even that The Dice Man intended to be a text with any psychoanalytical credibility. I read this as a satire, and interpreted it as such.
If there is one valuable and realistically applicable lesson the Diceman gives us, it is that we should not take for granted a life in which we are neither content nor discontent, going through the motions of living but not really doing a single thing that is outside of others' expectations for us. Luke Rhinehart is right to question what happens to us between the ages of 2 and 32 to make us so damn boring, so resigned to the "way things are." And though none (or very few) of us will be courageous (and foolish!) enough to try to explore the limitless possibilities of man in the way that Dr. Rhinehart does, this novel is an interesting ride in an alternate reality that observes what would happen if we truly did leave things up to chance. Because let's face it- we usually break ourselves and sometimes others trying not to.
Something interesting to consider is that Rhinehart manages to take an idea of value and take it somewhere it didn't need to be taken.
I will agree with Rhinehart in this: A man is not one person. We have many tendencies and quirks of the personality, some which we embrace more than others. But I disagree with Rhinehart in that I think society actually encourages our tendency towards multiple personalities. Different people and different interactions unlock different selves outside of our usual "Selves," so that in the end, we are different versions of ourselves in the presence of different people. In order to survive in this society that Lukehart claims to detest, we have to be students for our teachers, children for our parents, lovers for our lovers, and a mix of it all for ourselves. I think what Luke did not realize was that he was already "role-playing" in his "normal life" long before the Dice Man and Dice Centers existed. Perhaps the "rapist" (I'm not even going to get into his '70s, incorrect use of the verb "rape") in us who wants to commit adultery never (or almost never) gets full reign, but this does not diminish the fact that plenty of other personalities and roles inhabit our bodies and minds at once, all squabbling to get out. In a lot of ways, Rhinehart seemed to me a man desperate to find something that had already been sitting right in front of him for many, many years. And then he couldn't go back for fear of reneging on the promise that has come to be his life and religion: the Dice.
Stoner- by John Williams
Reading Stoner was a complete, fulfilling experience within itself. John Williams writes with perfect clarity and a steady patience, and draws the character of William Stoner with the fine strokes of an experienced artist.
The most satisfying element of the book is that it does not strive to be anything. There is a calmness, a passive but observant voice that pervades the book and soon enough the reader's mind. I will say of this book what Stoner said of the ideal pursuit of academics- this book is life itself, and not specific means to specific ends. Williams does not manipulate Stoner to teach us morals, or illustrate human shortcomings to which we can all lay claim. Though, in the end, Willy succeeds in doing both.
In the cocoon of surreal protection that is the University of Columbia, Missouri, William Stoner watches on as if he were a stranger to his own life: the passing of two world wars, his own estrangement from his wife, the pregnancy of a daughter who has slowly become a stranger to him, and the coming and going of men within the one institution that stands through it all. If John Williams were not the writer that he is, we might be offended by Stoner's apparent impassiveness towards the turbulent times that surround his stooping shoulders. We might even detest him for his lack of passion for justice, and his unconvinced attitude towards war. But we do not. Williams makes us understand that Stoner's hardened outer self is incapable of betraying the emotions boiling underneath- the violent wanting, the sorrow, the gnawing regret. Betraying them, acknowledging them would mean he would have to live with them, and they would crush him.
Towards the end of the book, Stoner asks himself calmly and repeatedly, his mind still retaining some clarity within a failing body, "What did you expect?" The last days of his life are ones in which "regret" does not exist because "failure" proves no longer to be a meaningful word. He is held in a kind of languor, recognizing that although the passions that once shook his body are long gone, there still exists the undeniable fact that he was, and still, for a short while, is- maybe not for anything, but that does not lessen the reality of the past and present. In his last moments, Stoner holds the one book he penned in his hand, smiling at the weak realization that a small part of what he once was lies within those printed pages. His journey has not led Williams' readers to some epiphany or deep understanding of life. Indeed, it happily never promised to do anything of the sort. Instead, the audience is left in contemplation of how, in such a quiet, plodding way, this novel has managed to capture the violent irony of life, a life that numbs us down to a sort of quiet resignation, though within it lie moments of honest-to-God happiness.
The most satisfying element of the book is that it does not strive to be anything. There is a calmness, a passive but observant voice that pervades the book and soon enough the reader's mind. I will say of this book what Stoner said of the ideal pursuit of academics- this book is life itself, and not specific means to specific ends. Williams does not manipulate Stoner to teach us morals, or illustrate human shortcomings to which we can all lay claim. Though, in the end, Willy succeeds in doing both.
In the cocoon of surreal protection that is the University of Columbia, Missouri, William Stoner watches on as if he were a stranger to his own life: the passing of two world wars, his own estrangement from his wife, the pregnancy of a daughter who has slowly become a stranger to him, and the coming and going of men within the one institution that stands through it all. If John Williams were not the writer that he is, we might be offended by Stoner's apparent impassiveness towards the turbulent times that surround his stooping shoulders. We might even detest him for his lack of passion for justice, and his unconvinced attitude towards war. But we do not. Williams makes us understand that Stoner's hardened outer self is incapable of betraying the emotions boiling underneath- the violent wanting, the sorrow, the gnawing regret. Betraying them, acknowledging them would mean he would have to live with them, and they would crush him.
Towards the end of the book, Stoner asks himself calmly and repeatedly, his mind still retaining some clarity within a failing body, "What did you expect?" The last days of his life are ones in which "regret" does not exist because "failure" proves no longer to be a meaningful word. He is held in a kind of languor, recognizing that although the passions that once shook his body are long gone, there still exists the undeniable fact that he was, and still, for a short while, is- maybe not for anything, but that does not lessen the reality of the past and present. In his last moments, Stoner holds the one book he penned in his hand, smiling at the weak realization that a small part of what he once was lies within those printed pages. His journey has not led Williams' readers to some epiphany or deep understanding of life. Indeed, it happily never promised to do anything of the sort. Instead, the audience is left in contemplation of how, in such a quiet, plodding way, this novel has managed to capture the violent irony of life, a life that numbs us down to a sort of quiet resignation, though within it lie moments of honest-to-God happiness.