Stoner
John Williams’s Stoner (originally published in 1965 and re-released in 2003) follows the life of titular character William Stoner from his childhood home on the Missouri plains to the University of Missouri where he found his calling in the study literature. Williams’s prose is as plain and straightforward as is his protagonist, but the emotional depth of this novel as it weaves through decade upon decade from the 19teens onward, is deeply moving. Likewise, Stoner’s slow and unassuming life, as he settles with one sadness, one misfortune, one disappointment after another, seemed fitting of his sleepy midwestern university setting. John Williams’s novel is at once beautifully simple and profound. In Stoner students of literature will perhaps see themselves, but ultimately Stoner becomes a sort of everyman as he faces, time and time again, life’s depressing realities and faces the overall insignificance of any given life in the grand scheme of things.
I dare not mislead though, Stoner is by no means a dismal tome brimming with suggestions of the tragic unimportance of any singular life. Williams manages to make Stoner’s life, which many would consider tragic, somehow hopeful with William Stoner’s almost zen ability to accept the life he finds himself living. Stoner’s mediocre career, mentally unstable wife, doomed love affair, and tragic daughter, all lead him not to despair, but rather to preserve. Overall, I found Stoner’s indifference to his own suffering aspirational; life is, after all, full of suffering beyond one’s control. Stoner seems to sit outside what seems modern man’s need to achieve great works, great love, great life. And he does so without overwhelming melancholy. Even at the point of his death, he embraces the life he has had constantly returning to the question, “what did you expect?” as he prepares to depart from the world. I found myself inspired by Stoner, and also, of course, heartbroken; he does little to change the things in his life that plague him, but on the other hand, he seems satisfied with his experience and the fact that he pursued his true calling: studying and teaching literature.
The simplicity of Williams’s prose and the psychological poignance with which he depicts his characters makes Stoner an underappreciated American classic. Williams’ selects a sort of antihero for his protagonist; there is nothing radically thrilling about Stoner’s life or his achievements. He is an American man, born at the beginning of the twentieth century who finds himself and his calling at university. Williams interweaves historical events—American involvement in WWI, the Great Depression, the lead up to WWII—with Stoner’s life story. In such a way Stoner is also a masterpiece that reflects American experience in the first half of the twentieth century; albeit from the quiet, understated perspective of William Stoner’s life.
Williams style builds on that of other great American novelists; in particular I found myself thinking of Willa Cather’s novels as I read Stoner. Reading Stoner reminded me time and time again of reading Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop or My Ántonia as all three novels follow one man through his adulthood to maturity, and in the case of the first two, death. Both Williams and Cather portray American experience in beautifully simple, descriptive prose. Likewise they both develop characters with whom readers can at once relate, even as the day-to-day of their lives differ greatly from our own. I can see why Stoner has been lauded by many in the twenty-first-century to be an American classic, since its re-release in the early years of this century; it certainly is a powerful story about a simple man living a simple life even in the midst of all the chaos of living.
A Few Great Passages:
“Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel that hew as out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoken to him. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape” (16).
“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not rad; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know” (26).
“He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter” (179).
“[T]he person one loves at first is not the person one loves last, [. . .] love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another” (194).
“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia” (195).
“They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical’; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other” (199).
“It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive” (250).
“He had no wish to die; but there were moments [. . .] when he looked forward impatiently, as one might look to the moment of a journey that one does not particularly wish to take. And like any traveler, he felt that there were many things he had to do before he left; yet he could not think what they were” (271).
“He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?” (275).
“It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial. He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there and would be there” (277).
Bibliography:
McGahern, John. Introduction. Stoner, by John Williams. New York Review of Books: 2003.
Williams, John. Stoner. New York Review of Books: 1965.
