John Williams

You need to travel light when you move about as we do.

 The book rule ‘unless you read it more than once, you don’t buy it’.

I thought Stoner was a book about weed. It sat on my Kindle for a month or so. I don’t recall how it got there. I was in no rush to read it.

I started reading it and could not put it down.

In Bangkok, I went to the second-hand bookstore. They had two of William’s books, Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing. I grabbed both.

I am beginning to realise that 20th-century US literature is what I prefer. It is an impressive list. Twain, Steinbeck, London, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Kerouac. On it goes.

More recently, Easton Ellis and McCarthy.

Easton Ellis wrote the introduction to Butcher’s Crossing.

I recall my favourite McCarthy books. Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and All the Pretty Horses. Along with True Grit by Portis, westerns were written with a clarity and detachment to violence that I admired.

I considered McCarthy a ground breaker in the genre.

Williams did it first. Butcher’s Crossing is a book of incredible scope. Blood Meridian is comparable, but that is all.

Stoner is one of the best books I have read. A bleak antagonist in a bleak existence marching toward an unimpressive climax. Written in a way that makes the mundane sublime in its humanity.

Stoner was a failure on release. I guess it has been discovered.

I am reading Augustus, William’s last book. I am willing to bet if I see it for sale in the flesh, I will buy it, and it will travel with his other two books.

“The man who wrote the perfect novel. John Williams and Stoner”

The Financial Times, Tobias Grey (2019)