John Williams And The Canon That Might Have Been

Have you read it? What did you think?

google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/18/john-williams-and-the-canon-that-might-have-been/amp

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Why do they keep insisting that Stoner is a perfect novel? It's not.

Can’t imagine why you’d critique an article you (clearly) didn’t read.

Can't imagine why you'd deflect and not answer a simple question. (cocksucker)

Thanks for wasting my time with a badly written article. Shame on you.

It's no War and Peace but it's a perfect short novel. What's your beef here exactly?

I gotta say I liked Butcher's Crossing more than Stoner.

Have you read Augustus? I just picked one from my local bookstore.

Is NYRB:C going to collect the fragments that remain of "The Sleep of Reason"? Most of what existed in the 80s was published in a two different literary journals, one of which Williams founded, but there's probably a tiny bit more. William's widow said what remains is beautiful. I'd love to read it.

You have no right to ask for an answer when you yourself won’t provide one:
>Stoner isn’t a perfect novel. [Here is my lack of support]

Because the author didn’t say that, you mongrel. The author pointed to the fact that fans say that. It’s also a completely and utterly minuscule point in relation to the whole article, and the fact you chose to focus on it without reading further makes you a brainlet and an incel.

New Yorker turned sjw a while ago
I won’t give them clicks

Stoner is atrocious

Were you be ironic when you used the term “sjw?”

How exactly did Stoner come into prominence again? It was to my understanding that it fell into obscurity upon it's publication back in the 60's.

I thought the New Yorker was fashy now, but i don’t keep up on murrican politics.

The manuscripts are currently sitting less than a mile away from me in a marked box in U of A’s archives.

Why are they at U of A? I thought they were all at Denver

Still have the jew problem so "fashy" ain't an option.

Can someone archive the article?

I preferred both Augustus and Butcher's Crossing to Stoner. Will give Stoner another read though.

There is a difference between perfection and ambition. It's a short, great novel, and I don't look at it and think "he really messed up right here in this specific spot." It's all well structured.

NYRB re-released it in 2006. Augustus was seen as his magnum opus, and was more well known since it was one of the two books that tied for the National Book Award in 1973. Maybe someone read Augustus and wondered if he wrote anything else as good, and thus discovered Stoner. I'm sure they have tons of people reading out of print books by good writers, searching for the next dark horse classic.

More or less agree. Williams is a strong writer and formalism/highly-technical writing definitely deserves its time in the sun. That said, a book can't just be perfect to be worth reading. It also has to introduce something new.

Who are some other great late 20th or 21st century authors that write in this restrained, formalist tradition (if that's the right way to describe it)?

There is a bunch of names to that effect in the article.

I'm sorry, I misread your question. I don't know, I don't read much contemporary fiction, and what I have read was nothing like that.

Stoner is more than all that.

Augustus > Stoner > Butcher's Crossing

All three are excellent, but this is the patrician's true ranking

What's left unsaid in this essay:

The Stone vs. Herzog battle of 1965 had much more to do w/ rising Jewish influence on American culture. Jewish critics largely backed post-modernists like Barth, Barthelme, and Gass. They favored authors who joyously "deconstructed" WASP lit, as those in that movement did. (Just as Jewish art critics backed artists who "deconstructed" traditional modes of European representational art.)

There's nothing "conspiratorial" about this take. It reflects a pattern that was taking place in Western Europe around the same time.

Williams was a writer within the American WASP tradition. If not for the post-war advance of Jewish culture, he would have been a household name.

It's good to study the names of those in the alternate canon that Leo Robson proposes:

>a different postwar canon of American fiction might have taken shape, elevating such titles as James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” Ann Petry’s “Country Place,” Thornton Wilder’s “The Ides of March,” Cynthia Ozick’s “Trust,” Richard Stern’s “Other Men’s Daughters,” J. F. Powers’s “Morte d’Urban,” Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion,” William Maxwell’s “The Château,” Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin,” Richard Yates’s “The Easter Parade,” and Evan S. Connell’s paired volumes “Mrs. Bridge” and “Mr. Bridge.”

With the exception of Ozick and Stern, the list is predominantly gentile. A similar list from today's accepted canon would include many more Jewish names.

This observation isn't meant to disparage Jewish influence on American lit, but simply state the obvious: the decline of WASP control on American letters was a result of Jewish ascension.

War and Peace is the anti-Stoner. Incredibly ambitious and with no few issues, particularly in the second half. Still my favorite novel though.

It's still soon to talk about a canon of the second half of the 20th century. Stoner resurgence could as well revive an interest in other forgotten structuralist works. It wouldn't be the first time a book is overlooked at its time to end up being canonized decades later.

it always was sjw and j.

Nothing to do with the Jews. Those ***values*** had their day and then they got replaced with something else. There is no going back to pre-critical and pre-aware condition. Williams is a hack and simpleton in every possible way when compared to Barth, Barthelme, Gass and others.

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I finished reading Stoner two days ago. I thoroughly enjoyed this article. Thank you for sharing it.