BOOK BARN

#287: STONER. John Williams’s novel Stoner, is about a man who, born on a farm in Missouri, discovers at college not only a love of literature but a vocation to teach. The book moves with an utterly sure-handed, unrushed solidity; it has a tragic sense that recalls the great Russian novelists, with their ability in a paragraph to strip a character down to the bone. Movies about teachers have buried us in so much candied floss on the subject that this sobriety of observati

#286. RILKE’S BOOK OF HOURS. I have complained elsewhere of the cloistral hush that pervades much of Rilke’s work, the whispering tone that never capers or puns or farts, the cumulative effect of which I can find a bit suffocating. And Anita Barrows’s and Joanne Macy’s translation of his Book of Hours has saddled it with a subtitle, Love Poems to God, which I find not only icky but a bit misleading. But maybe all this is inseparable from what Rilke is for; as with the fla

#285: JOAN—II. Not the Joan of history, but Bernard Shaw’s. Some years ago my circle of friends ran heavily to local amateur and semi-pro actors, who were always kicking around what roles they dreamt of playing. One of them—one of the most gifted actors I’ve ever known personally—answered the question with a promptness that showed long forethought. When she said she wanted to play Shaw’s Joan, I was surprised: she was not religious, lit no candles to the Catholic church,