Book review: “Stoner” by John Williams

John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is one of the saddest novels ever published.  It’s sad not because it is maudlin, but because it isn’t.  Williams writes of William Stoner with such clarity of perception and such psychological nuance that the reader deeply identifies with the man whose seemingly simple and stolid life is chronicled from birth to death.

Stoner garnered few sales as a Viking hardcover and as a 1972 paperback from Pocket Books. But, more than a quarter century later, it was republished three times — by the University of Arkansas Press in 1998, by Vintage in 2003 and by New York Review Books Classics in 2006 — and its reputation skyrocketed.

Here, for instance, are the comments of four major writers:

• Julian Barnes: “A terrific novel of echoing sadness.”
• Nick Hornsby: “A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise, and elegant novel.”
• Ian McEwan: “A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life.”
• Ruth Rendell: “A wonderful book…simple, straightforward, and yet full of displaced, sad things.”

Why is the novel so sad?  And why is it now being seen as a classic of literature?

 

The arc of Stoner’s life

I think it is because Williams writes so well with such telling detail and such emotional resonance that the reader comes to believe in the existence of Stoner — indeed, to feel the life of Stoner.  And to feel the parallels in the reader’s own life.

The novel covers the arc of Stoner’s years, and, because of that, the reader experiences the events of those years within the context of all that happens to the character.

For instance, Stoner is born in 1891 to a farm couple in rural Missouri and spends his first 19 years as a farm worker, attuned like a farm animal to the rhythms of the calendar and the cycles of the seasons.  He is sent to the University of Missouri to study agriculture and goes, as a dutiful son, into the new, wider world, unsophisticated and unprepared.

Although much happens to change the trajectory of Stoner’s life, to turn him into a lover of literature and a teacher of literature — someone who finds in the art of great writers a glimpse at the depths of human feeling and experience — he is never not the unsophisticated, unprepared son unsure of himself in someone else’s world.

 

A life alone

Similarly, when he is dying in 1956 at the age of 65, Stoner is dying alone.  His daughter, his wife and his friend Gordon Finch are little more than interruptions to his internal monologue.  Except for his affair at the age of 41 with Katherine Driscoll, a much younger instructor at the University, Stone lived his life alone in his head.

Like the 19-year-old boy who arrived at the University alone and friendless, Stone remained throughout his long career separate, apart and without anyone to share his thoughts and feelings.

For six months, in the early 1930s, that changed when he and Katherine Driscoll conducted their love affair. And, for the two of them, it was a love that involved a deep physical and emotional bonding.  Yet, when one of Stoner’s colleagues threatened to raise a scandal, Stoner and Katherine Driscoll knew that their careers as teachers at the University would be threatened if they stayed together.  Katherine Driscoll left, and Stoner didn’t try to stop her.

In the end, Stoner’s love of literature and of teaching was stronger than his love for the young woman.

 

“The only life that had not betrayed him”

A few years after that affair and the illness that followed it, Stoner found himself with “a renewal of the old passion for study and learning.” It was “the only life that had not betrayed him.”

By the end of the book, the reader can tick off the many people who have betrayed Stoner during his life:

• He is betrayed by Edith Elaine Bostwick, the woman who becomes his wife and then spends their marriage emotionally distant and distraught.
• He is betrayed by Charles Walker, an arrogant and conniving disabled student whose accusations of prejudice against Stoner lead to the stagnation of his career.
• Walker’s mentor Hollis Lomax, the new chair of the English Department, betrays Stoner by imposing limitations that demean and isolate him.
• It is even possible to see Stoner’s daughter Grace as a betrayer.  Although as a young child she seemed to quietly connect with Stoner, she went along with her mother’s sudden, frenetic plans to impose total control over Grace’s life and get her away from her father.  Later, Grace becomes pregnant and marries to escape the family home and, ultimately, finds solace in liquor.

“Poor Daddy,” Grace says to Stoner in his final days. “Poor Daddy, things haven’t been easy for you, have they?”

 

The greatest betrayer

No question, many people and many circumstances combine to limit Stoner’s ability to study and teach, to hinder his ability to feel the scholar’s joy (which is the only joy he is able to find).

Yet, the greatest betrayer of Stoner is Stoner.

He never quite comes to understand this although he has glimpses.  But the reader is well aware of the many times that Stoner responds to difficult moments with stolid stoicism, with passive endurance, with an unwillingness or an inability to engage.

When his marriage starts off as a failure, he accepts it as it is rather than confronting his wife and seeking to improve their relationship.  When Edith keeps Grace away from Stoner — when she evicts him from his beloved study, when she relegates him to a back porch for school work and sleep — he accepts his fate.  When Hollis Lomax threatens scandal over Stoner’s relationship with Katherine Driscoll, Stoner gives up on her — letting her leave rather than finding a way to stay with her.

 

“Faith in the institution of the University”

Part of this unwillingness to engage can be blamed on his lack of preparation as a farm boy and naïve college student for dealing with complex emotions and experiences — and on his lack of friends who might have helped him with this.

Part can be blamed on his personality and character.  He was never going to be a live wire and a social animal.

The greatest part, however, must be blamed on Stoner’s decision to love learning and love the University more than any person, even Katherine Driscoll.

And, as in other moments of crisis and despair, he looked again to the cautious faith that was embodied in the institution of the University.  He told himself that it was not much; but he knew that it was all he had.

 

“Look! I am alive.”

Years after his affair, he learns that Katherine Driscoll has published the book she’d been working on.  He buys it and reads it and feels a renewal of his passion for learning and scholarship — and love.

Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there…

He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving.  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.

When it came to learning and scholarship, Stoner never let go.  But, when it came to love, Stoner, at every turn, simply stood there, feeling the words inside him, “Look!  I am alive,” but not willing or able to say them to be heard.

He remained the unsophisticated farm boy.  He remained the loner.  The love of his life was scholarship, and he put up with all the betrayals of his life so as not to lose the chance to learn and study and teach.

 

Echoes the reader’s life

That’s why Stoner is so sad.  It is a novel about someone in love who, at every turn, is blocked or hindered from embracing his love, his scholarship.  Circumstances and his own character — his unwillingness to risk, his inability to even see the need to risk — limit him in his relationships with others and throughout the arc of his life.

This story touches the reader so deeply because it echoes in the reader’s own life.

Like Stoner, the reader can look back on a life that has been limited by circumstances, by betrayers and by the reader’s own imperfections, whatever they are.  Every reader can look back and think: If I had only said what I felt…. If I hadn’t made that choice… If I’d risked (or not risked)…

This novel, I think, resonates particularly with writers and scholars as people who have devoted their lives to literature. The sadness that Julian Barnes, Nick Hornsby, Ian McEwan and Ruth Rendell find in Williams’ novel is rooted in their own love of literature.

How much have their hopes to achieve great things in letters, like Stoner’s, fallen short?  How much have their focus on study and learning, like Stoner’s, gotten into the way of their relationships with lovers and friends?

How much have their careers been betrayed, like Stoner’s, by circumstances and enemies? And by themselves?

 

The sad reality

Stoner is a sad novel because life is sad.  We are all hindered in living our lives. We all fail to do as much as we need to do to be as fully alive as possible.

He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, 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 had had found ignorance.  And what else? he thought.  What else?

What did you expect? he asked himself.

Stoner endured and found much less joy and happiness than he might have.  So, too, we endure and find as much joy and happiness as we’re able.  It is the sad reality that John Williams captures in Stoner.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.7.24