Ordinary and dazzling

The book "Stoner" by John Williams opens with these two audicious paragraphs:


William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University Library. This transcript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues."

An occasional student who comes by the inscription may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones, it is merely a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.


And from there launches into the story of Stoner's life, beginning with the next sentence:

He was born on a small farm in central Missouri near the town of Booneville, some forty miles from Columbia, the home of the University.


I'm not sure why I find this opening so thrilling, other than the implied boast by the novelist: "I will make this ordinary unspecial life of interest to you." Which he does.