In case I haven’t already given enough of a boost here for John Williams’s Stoner, I’ll just draw your attention to a piece about it by Bryan Appleyard in today’s Sunday Times (£). He calls it ‘the greatest book you have never read’. He also quotes the view of Ian McEwan:
Great authority in the prose, beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life, of how a gifted man can drift into obscurity, can almost lift himself into the clear light of happiness in love, then fall back. The awful wife, the disappointed hopes for the daughter, the bitter lifelong persecution by a fellow academic – it sounds depressing when these elements are listed, but Williams makes a thing of beauty out of them. The subjective rendering of Stoner’s death is unsurpassed in modern literature.
I’ll leave off now with the observation that it will become less and less true for all values of ‘you’ that ‘you’ have never read it.