No one can say precisely why John Williams' novel "Stoner" has become a best-seller almost 50 years after its first publication. After all, plenty of books, "forgotten" or otherwise, are recommended by word of mouth and yet most will not go on to sell more than a few hundred copies.
And it's hard to know in what ways, if any, its story — a young man falls in love with literature and thus a new world is revealed to him — might have touched people. Many of those who rushed to buy will not yet have got around to opening it and some will never read it. Stoner will languish on their shelves, its spine unbroken, just like Jung Chang's "Wild Swans," the nonfiction hit of 1992.
Still, it has given us something to think about, this dusting down of so plangent and substantial a novel. On BBC Radio 4 recently, Ruth Rendell, the novelist and British Labour Party peer, suggested that Stoner is a book for our times, her argument being that we live in an age when reading is for most an alien pastime, just as it is to William Stoner until he has an epiphany.