I just finished this. Bawled my fucking eyes out. Why was Edith such a cunt???????

lomax was a fruit for the kid, plus they were cripplebuddies

he was reeeeeing over perceived bigotry in stoner

Was he actually gay? I don't think this was ever implied. I think he just felt sorry for the kid.

no, im making it up

Uh, okay then

made ya think

I thought it started after he got drunk at stoner's party and made, what seemed to be, a pass at his wife.

I think Edith had borderline personality disorder

he saw himself in walker and therefor tried to protect him

This. I thought that was pretty obvious.

Also, side-note. Despite Walker's pretensions, he seems smarter than most undergrads today. Smarter than most professors even. Certainly smarter than I am. Is Stoner supposed to be the last of a dying breed? Most ambitious students/ teachers I know at University engage in a kind of incestuous back-patting ritual with a motive of gain. i.e. they'll host a literary event with themselves or their peers as speakers, and the only students to attend will be those hoping to rub shoulders with the speakers and get some influence. TL;DR: Are most modern academics, Walkers?

The whole Lomax and cripple kid situation was really weird. Was there nobody else who could see that the kid was a bad student? Why not have the interview again with three different professors and look at the inevitably poor (for the cripple kid) outcome?

Fantastic book though. John Williams is my all time favourite author. I'd rank his books as such:

1. Augustus
2. Butcher's Crossing
3. Stoner
4. Nothing But The Night

They're all masterpieces though, don't let the ranking discourage you from reading them all.

it was kind of implied, i thought, when stoner is talking to his friend (the dean, forget his name), and they both say what the hell, why is lomax doing this shit, probably don't want to know...

nice thought, and that's probably true to a large extent

a part of the book, i think, is stoner's inability to act on his own behalf, but especially with edith

he should have stopped her from being such a cunt, if nothing else than for his relationship with his daughter, he should have told edith they're moving so he didn't have to put up with lomax's gay ass bullshit, etc.

use spoiler tags, you fucking monkey

Agreeing with this guy I think Edith was more of a challenging personality, and when pressed against Stoner's overall passivity and submission, it would irritate her and only inflate the toxicity regarding how Edith would think of—and interact with—her husband. She was just feeding her own bitterness into a feedback loop, while Stoner lacked a will to burst from his inhibitions/complacency, and they both became more and more miserable.

That said, I haven't read it for five years, but this is the feeling I remember. I had just pulled the trigger on a divorce from a marriage that reminded me all too much like the Edith/Stoner dynamic, and this book really cemented a determination in my head to watch myself and pay attention to when I may be settling in life, and when I should take a risk for something better.

>spoilers/reading for plot
And you wonder why you aren't patrician

That made me so furious. I feel that maybe David Masters could have knocked some sense into him. Did anyone get the sense that Dave was a Hemingway type who died before he could write the great American novel?

He should have just raped her when she started denying him sex. During those times he would have gotten away with it. Who would she even complain to? Hell people would even think he were in the right back then, sex being an important part of marriage and all.

Yeesh

Finished what, a painting?

that'sexactlywhatI call moving book

Try reading the thread, oh wait I forgot nobody reads here, i'm on Veeky Forums

It's obviously Stoner you cuck, it's just incredibly poor form the way OP started. It would be like starting a thread about Thus Spoke Zarathustra with just Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and referring to nothing but "it".

>pretend to not know what it is
>tell you how obvious it is
>I was just pretending to be retarded
everytime

>pretending you don't understand sarcasm
>was just pretending to be retarded
>shitposting hurr durr

Kek

dumb.

>that'sexactly

She was either sheltered(which is undoubtedly true since she was from a bourgeois family), or she was mentally ill.

Either way, it didn't seem like it ran that deep consider the book ended the way it did.

He identified with ol' crippled Walker and was probably ashamed/regretful about his behavior at the party and his opening up to Stoner

It's actually concerning that almost everyone is on Stoner's side in the Walker problem. Wasn't Walker one of the brightest in the class? He was not a good student to Stoner's eyes and I get the conflict, but the book clearly shows a passionate, maybe too edgy, smart guy, with the ability to improvise (up to a certain level) and to relate concepts easily.
Don't universities want more Walkers than Katherines (let's just accept he was idealising her)? If it was me I'd surely prefer being a sort of Kierkegaard than a boring good enough Locke.

ALL RIGHT GUYS, WHAT'S SO GOOD ABOUT THIS BOOK? WHAT WOULD YOU COMPARE IT TO?

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