Book review: Stoner

John Williams' 1965 classic. Or, the best book ever written.

John Williams opens Stoner by spoiling it. The first paragraph reads:

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 courses.

If you’re worried about an uninspiring read at this point, the second paragraph does nothing to assuage your concerns:

An occasional student who comes upon the name 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 which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

True to this summary, Stoner is a book in which nothing much happens—outwardly, at least. It’s the world's most subdued bildungsroman, following a quiet youth turned quiet professor who does not become famous, get the girl, or always make the right decision.

And yet, in a NYT book review, Morris Dickstein said of Stoner: "it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away." If you search for reviews online, you'll quickly learn that the book has something like a cult following, especially among men. "A masterpiece", "devastatingly moving", "only book to have ever affected me like this", "one of the most impactful books I've ever read in my 68 years," are some of the responses you'll stumble across.

I endorse the praise. Stoner is my favorite book, and I expect that I will reread it every few years until I die. It is, however, frustratingly difficult to articulate why it's so good. But a clue is contained in the title of Dickstein's review, which is called "The Inner Lives of Men."

A developmental arc that most of us experience is realizing that we are devastatingly ordinary. We won't be famous. We won't change the world. Buildings and ideas won't be named after us and we won't be talked about much after we're gone. While we may leave our mark in some small way, we will be left out of history’s grand narrative.

But within an ordinary life there is still love and loss and dignity and virtue. There are difficult choices to make and principles to stand up for (or not). Stoner is the portrait of an undistinguished professor who faces the harshness of the world and doesn't always win. The portrait of someone who, like most of us, can’t satisfactorily navigate all the tensions in his life. And those tensions are not something out of Dostoevsky or Homer. Stoner is not embroiled in murderous plots or lost at sea for a decade. His problems are disarmingly mundane and recognizable.

Stoner’s wife, Edith, turns vindictive and controlling, slowly draining the warmth from his home life and poisoning his relationship with their daughter. At the university, he is confronted with the decision of whether to remain in the cocoon of academia during WWII. Later, he faces an administrative battle over a graduate student, Charles Walker, who is supported by another professor, Hollis Lomax. Walker is a fraud—verbally gifted but unwilling or unable to put in the necessary work to pass his qualifying exams.

The reader watches Stoner stoically decide which problems to focus on. He does not go to war, but later learns that one of his two best friends was killed on the front lines. He speaks up once or twice about his daughter, but Edith has him outmaneuvered. He witnesses the erosion of his relationship with his daughter who, by the end of the book, has lost her first husband and descended into alcoholism.

The battle he elects to fight is with Walker and Lomax. He stands up for the integrity of the institution, choosing to fail an undeserving student despite personal and professional repercussions. Lomax is the head of the English department and makes Stoner's academic life hellish afterwards. But Stoner was not thinking of the consequences for himself. The university introduced Stoner to his first true love—literature. It is a sacred space, deserving of his protection.

It's easy to criticize Stoner’s choices. In fact, I think Williams wants us to criticize his choices. Surely he should have fought harder for his daughter?

John Edward Williams. It’s very appropriate that Stoner flopped when it was originally released in 1965. It has since experienced a resurgence, especially in Europe.

But life is rarely so clean. It’s unusual for there to be one grand moment where you can Fight The Power and stand up for your beliefs. There are instead a long series of small, often inconsequential, decisions whose aggregate sum defines your convictions. It's easy to have regrets in hindsight. It's harder to realize in the moment that your passivity is weakness masquerading as wisdom and will cause you great anguish later on. Stoner makes his choices and, like all of us, makes some of the right ones and some of the wrong ones.

Despite Stoner's mistakes and losses, he is not a tragic figure. His life is good in many ways. In John McGahern’s introduction to the book, he quotes a passage from John Williams’ Denver Quarterly interview:

[Stoner] had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. He was a witness to values that are important... The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job. Teaching to him is a job—a job in the good and honorable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was... It's the love of the thing that's essential.

The quiet dignity that Stoner brings to his studies and his teaching is part of why the book feels so precious. Here is an otherwise ordinary man, whose life is neither great nor terrible, who experiences both love and despair, but who takes duty seriously. Once he has chosen his battles, he is unwilling to cave even in the face of immense pressure. The ordinariness of Stoner's life makes him relatable but his perseverance makes him a hero.

Stoner finds love in his work, but also in his relationships. A fellow graduate student, Gordon Finch, remains a loyal friend for life, eventually becoming dean of the school and helping Stoner navigate Lomax’s revenge. And, while Stoner’s marriage with Edith is cold, he finds deep romantic connection with a younger colleague, Katherine Driscoll.

Stoner and Katherine first meet as teacher and student, with her attending his graduate seminar. She stays on to teach at the university where she and Stoner carry out a delicate courtship, one we’re continually terrified that Stoner is going to bungle. But he doesn’t, and their time together is some of the happiest that either have ever known. Their pleasure in each other’s company is summed up by Katherine's comment "lust and learning, that's all there really is, isn't it?" which is possibly the best line that has ever been uttered in the English language.

Williams paints a picture of a relationship which is intoxicating for someone with my temperament:

For their life together that summer was not all love-making and talk. They learned to be together without speaking, and they got the habit of repose; Stoner brought books to Katherine's apartment and left them, until finally they had to install an extra bookcase for them. In the days they spent together Stoner found himself returning to the studies he had all but abandoned; and Katherine continued to work on the book that was to be her dissertation. For hours at a time she would sit at the tiny desk against the wall, her head bent down in intense concentration over books and papers, her slender pale neck curving and flowing out of the dark blue robe she habitually wore; Stoner sprawled in the chair or lay on the bed in like concentration.

Sadly, it doesn’t last. Lomax vindictively derails the relationship. Katherine moves away and she and Stoner never speak again, though Stoner later notices that she dedicated her first book to him.

Just as Stoner found romantic love later in his life, he came late to his love of literature. He grew up on a farm with no thought of doing anything other than farming until his father encouraged him to attend university. He went to study agriculture—to learn modern techniques which he could on the family farm when he returned. But his attention is inadvertently captured by a live reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 during a required English class:

William Stoner realized that for several moments he had been holding his breath. He expelled it gently, minutely aware of his clothing moving upon his body as his breath went out of his lungs. He looked away from Sloane about the room. Light slanted from the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from within them and go out against a dimness; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Stoner became aware that his fingers were unclenching their hard grip on his desk-top.

Stoner isn't particularly good at English literature. You certainly wouldn't call him gifted. But he can't help himself: he's transfixed by the subject. He spends his free time roaming the library, pulling out books here and there, taking a selection home to read at night.

This fascination leads him to drop his agricultural studies and switch his major. He can't justify his decision and he doesn't tell his parents. It takes Arthur Sloane, his first year English teacher, to point out the obvious:

Sloane leaned forward until his face was close; Stoner saw the lines on the long thin face soften, and he heard the dry mocking voice become gentle and unprotected.

"But don't you know, Mr. Stoner?" Sloane asked. "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Sloane said softly.

"How can you tell? How can you be sure?" : "It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that.”

We're often fed stories of the famous academic who was ferociously precocious and gifted from a young age—the Richard Feynmans, the Terence Taos, the Scott Aaronsons of the world.

But John Williams wrote an ode to a different kind of learner: the late learner. Stoner wasn't surrounded by books when he was young. He had never heard of Shakespeare before that first English class. It never occurred to him to study literature; he didn’t know that it was a subject that one could study.

But the subject duly transforms him and, alongside Sloane, the reader recognizes that literature is the first love of Stoner’s life. Until his death, the best hours of his life are spent at his desk reading.

My love for this part of the book is largely personal. While less romantic than Stoner's story, I also came late to my love of learning. In high school, I wasn’t racing home to read or watch lectures on youtube. I was trying to fit in and failing to have girls notice me. Even once university rolled around, I was only there to get a job. I started in biology, hoping—like 999 out of the other 1000 students in biology 101—to go to medical school. Education was an exercise in pragmatism, not something one did for its own sake.

Luckily, I was forced to take some math classes. (Thank God for those stupid breadth requirements.) This sent me down a rabbit hole from which I've yet to emerge, opening up a whole new world for me.

Academic Hall at the University of Missouri, the institution that gave Stoner life.

The book begins its ending with Stoner’s merciless evaluation of his own life:

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that . . . He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine.”

Stoner’s reflections mirror those of the readers' throughout the novel. He, and we, begin with disappointment, wondering if his life has been a failure. But then, for the same reasons we fell in love with him, Stoner finds a self-respect:

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure --as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry.

There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

Stoner closes his eyes a final time. The book he was holding, the only book he wrote during his academic career, falls to the floor. Very few people will ever read it. And that’s fine.

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We talked about this one in book club. You can listen to the episode here (this was an early one, my audio quality sucks unfortunately).