Two Civilized Books

Despite rain and cranky kids I spent much of a delicious Independence Day, thanks to air conditioning and other American blessings, reading books by authors I have discovered since launching Anecdotal Evidence. John Williams is experiencing a posthumous revival thanks to New York Review Books, which recently returned Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner to print. His third novel, Augustus, which shared the National Book Award for fiction in 1973, when the award still had a trace of significance, is also available in paperback.

Of them I’ve read only Stoner, and that was in February 2006, shortly after I started this blog. I wrote about it three days in a row (here, here and here) while on a visit to New York, and it remains the most memorable fiction I’ve read in recent years. I literally mean “memorable.” Its scenes, characters, phrases and something more intangible, a mood of stoical sadness, often stray through my mind. I haven’t read The New York Times Book Review in years, but on June 17 it published a generous reevaluation of Williams’ novel, by Morris Dickstein:

“John Williams’s Stoner is something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away. Ignored on publication in 1965, a clamorous year, it has been kept alive by enthusiasts who go into print every decade to rediscover it . . .”

Dickstein is not overstating his case for Stoner. It’s a beautiful novel and a rare one because it’s written for grownups, an endangered species of reader. The other book I’m reading is also aimed at adults, or at least readers with adult sensibilities – The Big Lie, by the fine Canadian poet David Solway. When was the last time you read a book that draws its title from Mein Kampf? In this case, the Hitlerian allusion is apt. Solway’s subject is the threat to civilization posed by Islam and its duped Western apologists. Solway’s inflammatory preoccupation is always truth, that most embattled commodity. There’s something here to offend almost every soft-headed reader:

“It is curious to observe that the religious Islamic Right and the secular Western Left have joined forces in creating a post-Orwellian form of doublespeak – peace (surrender), resistance (terrorism), apartheid (self-defence), freedom of religion (Islamic privilege), anti-Zionism (antisemitism), international community (competitive dissensus), diplomacy (appeasement), justice (prejudice) – phrases used like flags of convenience under which to float and ideological agenda and to avoid the high cost of truth.”

What Stoner and The Big Lie share, in their very different forms and rhetorics, is the value of civilization. Both state or imply a dedication to the Western values of learning, truth-seeking, and respect for the individual self – precisely the values the barbarians and death-cultists and their fellow travelers hold in contempt and will destroy if given the chance.

Happy Independence Day, and happy birthday to my nephew Abraham Patrick Kurp, who turned 18 on Wednesday.