It might not
qualify as the best opening lines in fiction, and if John Williams (1922-1994) had have
submitted this to an agent in 2015:
“William Stoner
entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age
of nineteen.”
Chances are it wouldn’t
have risen up and out of the slush pile. But do yourself a favor this summer and get Stoner!
“Stoner,” the
novel by John Williams, has been reissued by the invaluable New York Review
Books series, with an introduction by the great Irish author, John McGahern.
Here is what McGahern (By the Lake, Amongst Women, The Dark, The Barracks) had
to say about Stoner:
“If the novel can
be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms
love takes and all the forces that oppose it.”
In these days of
the shortest of short attention spans, first lines of fiction usually clump in
the extraordinarily clever or brilliantly concise, say in the variety of George
Orwell’s “1984”: It was bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen.”
But then there
are those that catch fire like “Stoner” does, and don’t stop burning brightly
until the end, with, in his case, perfectly chosen words in a final passage that leave us in awe of what it can
mean to tell a story as large as life itself from such a simple beginning.
Next: Running for
Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday
