Adult Fiction

Here's how novelist John Williams, in Stoner, describes the inevitable end of a love affair between a middle-aged professor and a student:

"But finally they had to talk, he knew; though the words they said were like a performance of something they had rehearsed again and again in the privacies of their knowledge. They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect -- "We have been happy, haven't we?" -- to the past -- "We were happy -- happier than anyone, I think" -- and at last came to the necessity of discourse."

I admire that paragraph immensely, the way Williams uses grammar (and these are academics in the 1930s -- I'm not sure the same device could be used today) and the double meanings built into the names of verb tenses ("perfect," "past") -- to render the sadness and civility of such an impossible love affair. Stoner is among the saddest, bleakest novels I know, and crafted without resort to narrative shenanigans. It is one of those rare books written by an adult for adults, a book that repects the reader's maturity and contains not the smallest suggestion of cynicism or sentimentality.

I finished reading the novel during a three-day trip to upstate New York, reading the final pages during the flight home to Houston, somewhere, I think, over Missouri, where the novel is set.