Stoner

Summary (from the publisher): William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known.

And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

 

Review: "William Stoner entered the University of Minnesota 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 courses" (3).  

 

In every way, Stoner seems to be an ordinary man, yet by the end of this novel he emerges as a quiet hero, unrecognized by the world. Until his death, he struggles on quietly, admirably, and honorably in the face of numerous defeats - professional misunderstandings, a wife with whom he cannot be close, parents who are irrevocably distanced by his chosen career, the loss of a once close relationship with his only child, and painful separation from his one great love. Stoner inspires in the reader the devotion and admiration that he never gains in life. Williams tells Stoner's story in graceful and spare prose; it's little exaggeration to label this book a "work of quiet perfection."

 

I loved Stoner for his devotion to his principles, even when it means personal loss. Although he comes from a farming community, he commits fully to the value of education and is loyal to the end to the ideals of a university education. He recognizes that he is a piece in a larger academic puzzle and is there to continue the tradition of study and pass on the collected knowledge that was passed on to him. "For several minutes after they left he sat unmoving, staring out before him at the narrow planked flooring that had been worn bare of varnish by the restless feet of students he would never see or know" (14). To his students Stoner is just as devoted and replaceable as his parents were to their farm: "they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves" (108).  

 

This is a painful, tragic book, but a quiet tragedy that is largely unacknowledged by those around Stoner. Stoner has a formal relationship with his parents, but their love is felt in their sacrifice to send him away to college. When he finally is forced to tell them that he will not be returning to the farm, his mother's grief is all too real, "Her eyes were squeezed shut; she was breathing heavily, her face twisted as if in pain, and her closed fists were pressed against her cheeks" (24). Yet Stoner's silent acknowledgement of this pain is the image of him laying restless on his bed, staring "with open eyes into the darkness above him" (24). The reader is inundated with these moments of quiet pain throughout Stoner's life. For instance, when he finally confronts the reality that he has lost the chance to have a close relationship with his daughter; "he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died" (244).

 

Throughout, the reader hopes for the tide to turn for the socially awkward by incredibly endearing Stoner. Yet the relentless onslaught of disappointments sees Stoner near the end of his career, questioning whether his life is worth living. "He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned" (213). His one enduring escape seems to be literature and his love for teaching.

 

The least believable aspect of this novel is the character of Edith, Stoner's wife. It seemed unlikely that she would agree to marry Stoner in the first place, but her behavior after their marriage comes across as mentally disturbed (and perhaps it was meant to). She is seemingly unable to feel affection, sympathy, or love towards anyone, least of all her husband. When her father dies, she systematically destroys every object he ever gave her and wages war against her husband by slowly killing the connection between Stoner and his child and making him feel like an unwelcome guest in his own home. She seemed like a stock madwoman rather than a fully realized person.

 

I cannot believe I've had this book sitting in my to be read stack since probably 2008. A hauntingly tragic novel, it is also superbly written.

 

Stars: 5