Isham Cook's Reviews > Stoner

If nothing else, a novel should be instructive. This novel was a trying read but I managed to get through it and learned how NOT to live life. It’s a well-regarded novel and is indeed competently written, but it’s a dreary story, with the most tediously dull and dreadful characters. Clearly, Williams is spoofing bourgeois academic society here, but the parody is so withering and the trappings so desiccated that there isn’t very much to work with. Perhaps it’s a perverse sort of test: the reader that succeeds in finishing the book realizes they actually belong in the book and the joke is on them.