It took my legs out from under me.

I have been putting this off for a month because I did not think I could do it justice, and I still do not think I can, so here is the best I have got.

Nothing happens in Stoner. A farm boy goes to university to study agriculture, falls into English literature the way you fall into a river, becomes a teacher, marries badly, loves briefly, is bullied by a colleague for twenty years, and dies. That is the entire plot. I have just written out the plot of most people's lives.

And yet I have not been taken apart by a book like this since I was a teenager. There is a moment early on in a lecture theatre where old Sloane reads him a Shakespeare sonnet and asks him what it means, and Stoner cannot answer, and something in him has silently changed forever. That is where his real life begins. I read that page on a train to Doncaster and had to look out of the window for a bit.

The marriage to Edith is one of the most painful things I've read. Not dramatic. Just relentless and small and daily, a slow closing of doors — room by room — until there is nowhere left in his own house for the man to sit down. And the way she gets at him through the child. Grace starts as a bright quiet little girl doing her homework in her father's study and ends up where she ends up, and I found her almost unbearable. She is the great sadness of the book and she is on maybe forty of its pages.

Then Katherine. Those chapters are the warmest thing Williams ever put down and he lets them last about as long as such things last in real life, which is to say nothing like long enough, and then that gets taken off him as well. Lomax and Walker and the whole department business are hateful in the very particular way that only small institutional cruelty can be; anybody who has ever worked anywhere at all will recognise a Lomax.

And the whole time the prose is plain as bread. No fireworks. No showing off. It walks along at walking pace and then, once or twice, stops your heart with about nine words.

Why is it a ten when it is so sad? Because it is not actually a sad book, whatever everybody says. It is a book about a man who found the one thing he loved and got to spend his life near it, even while everything else was being carried out of the house, and that last page with him holding the book he wrote, and the light, and the students out on the lawn, is the closest thing to Grace I have found in a novel.

I bought three copies and gave two away. One came back with a note in it from my brother-in-law, who does not read, saying "well that was a lot." It was.

Everybody should read it. Not everybody will get on with it. The pub lot gave it a five point nine and I've not fully recovered.