How to Read John Williams: Where to Begin and What to Notice

Part of: The Deep Reader

Stoner disposes of a career in its first paragraph: university, appointment, rank, death. John Williams then begins giving those settled facts a life they were too small to contain. If you are wondering where to enter his novels, that strange relation between a record and a person is one good beginning.

Choose Stoner for work, teaching, marriage, and private attachments; Butcher's Crossing for an expedition whose physical demands test an imagined freedom; Augustus for political history assembled through documents and competing memories. Each makes its own entrance possible. There is little reward in postponing the book you want until you have completed a supposedly proper order.

This guide discusses openings and early situations. It leaves later relationships, the expedition’s outcome, and the novels’ endings undisclosed.

Choose the kind of experience you want

Stoner arrives in Missouri to study agriculture. Gradually, the university becomes somewhere he can imagine staying. No academic expertise is required to follow him. Attend to who first makes a possibility available, what accepting it will require, and whom he finds it hard to tell. A different future begins through other people's knowledge as well as through a private attachment.

William Andrews reaches the Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing after leaving Harvard. The available desk work does not answer what he came west to find. Choose this beginning for travel, practical work, and the friction between expectation and a place encountered by the body. Expect sustained description and graphic animal killing; the buffalo hunt is central, not incidental scenery.

The friction begins before the hunt. Dust enters clothing, travel leaves aches, and a bath needs water somebody has carried upstairs. These are demands the imagined west had not fully made on Andrews. Let them take the time the sentences give them. Equipment and inconvenience are among the opening's pleasures, and impatience with them may tell you which experience you wanted from another book.

In Augustus, letters, memoir fragments, and journal entries bring the future emperor among people with reasons of their own for describing him. Begin here for maneuvering, recollection, and the pleasure of testing one account against another. You will pause over more names and dates than in Stoner; use the document headings before building elaborate outside notes.

After Stoner, try Butcher's Crossing for bodily exposure or Augustus for a wider political company. After the expedition, Stoner lets commitments develop across decades; after Augustus, it offers a more continuous attachment to one man. Publication order becomes useful when you have something particular to ask about Williams's development. It need not govern the first choice.

Keep the document headings in view in Augustus

Caesar's prologue letter to his niece Atia is dated 45 B.C. and begins, “Send the boy to Apollonia.” Affectionate persuasion follows the blunt instruction, then political authority asserts itself. Before we have mastered a Roman cast, we can hear a powerful uncle making arrangements for a mother's son.

Read each document as an address to somebody. Who wants what from this recipient now? Caesar's family relation does not soften away the force available behind the letter. Remembering the mother receiving it makes the political pressure more legible than treating it as an item of historical information alone.

Book One begins decades later, with Agrippa's memoir fragments and Maecenas writing to Livy in 13 B.C. Their accounts look back while their headings tell us where the act of remembering takes place. Public service and achievement govern Agrippa's record; awkwardness and laughter enter the recollection of a first meeting in Maecenas. The forms give each writer a different reason to preserve the past.

A small bookmark list can serve: Octavius, the boy who becomes Augustus; Agrippa, friend and military associate; Maecenas, writing to Livy. Add a person when the relationship requires it. An advance family tree may ask you to remember everybody before the novel has given you a reason to care about anyone.

The documents are Williams's fiction. Let memory and persuasion occur inside them before asking history to settle every reference. Consult a short account when an uncertainty blocks a relationship or action; the headings already provide much of the first orientation.

Questions that can get in the way

Has Stoner spoiled itself on the first page?

Williams has chosen to disclose the death and rank. A detailed introduction can disclose much more than that. Save it for afterward if you want the rest of the life to reach you through the scenes he arranged.

Does its quiet reputation mean that nothing happens?

The first chapter already contains decisions that redirect the life. Repetition is one way their consequences develop. If the pace seems still, look at an expectation or daily arrangement: has someone begun living differently with something they chose? If the experience remains uninviting, Butcher's Crossing gives action another physical scale without requiring Stoner as preparation.

Should I take Stoner’s side in every conflict?

Closeness leaves room for resistance. In the early courtship, Stoner wants to understand Edith and is eager to believe he does. Keep her circumstances and replies beside his impression of them. Declaring him a virtuous victim before the conflict develops will make less of the novel than the narration permits you to see.

Is Butcher’s Crossing a conventional western?

Its town, hunters, and expedition offer a western reader a real entrance. The attention goes heavily toward fatigue, materials, supplies, and trade. Choose it for the bodily and economic circumstances of the undertaking. Heroic gunplay would be an expectation the opening has done little to encourage.

Must I study Roman history before Augustus?

Begin with the family relationship in the prologue and use the dated headings to locate the next voices. A name or office can be checked when it begins obstructing the scene. Historical summaries may reveal individual fates, so decide how much uncertainty you want to keep before consulting a long one.

Still undecided? Read the first chapter of Stoner before the introduction. The paragraph that appears to have told you everything is followed by a boy who does not yet know what he will do.

Sources

John Williams, Stoner, introduction by John McGahern, NYRB Classics, 2006, Chapter I (opening, family arrangement, university, and graduation) and Chapter III (early courtship). ISBN 9781590171998. Original English.

John Williams, Butcher’s Crossing, NYRB Classics ebook, 2011, Part One, Chapters I–II (arrival and first meeting with McDonald). ISBN 9781590174241. Publisher’s book description supplies the expedition’s broad premise. Original English.

John Williams, Augustus, NYRB Classics ebook, 2014, Prologue, Caesar to Atia (45 B.C.); Book One, Chapter 1, Agrippa’s memoir fragments and Maecenas to Livy (13 B.C.). ISBN 9781590178225. Original English.