NOVEL

John Williams, Stoner (New York Review Books, $14.95 paper). This darkly stoic novel, which tells the story of a Missouri farm boy who became a professor of literature, is reminiscent of and directly comparable in quality to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! Originally published in 1965, it is an insufficiently heralded masterpiece, one of the most remarkable novels to be published in this country in the Sixties. Don’t look to Stoner if you want to have your heart warmed, but anyone strong enough to look straight into the dual abyss of marital estrangement and frustrated aspiration will find it extraordinary in every way (TT).