Customer Reviews

Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'd never heard of this author or this book until I read an essay about him in an old back issue of Ploughshares by the novelist Dan Wakefield. I was suspect, too, because I'm not one for academic novels, unless they're farcical, because the only thing there seems to be at stake in academic novels is tenure, which in my opinion, doesn't make for such great reading. Well, not so in Stoner. Stoner is a quiet look at a man's largely unheroic and drab life, "an adventureless tale" as Joyce wrote (and in many respects William Stoner, the protagonist, comes right out of Dubliners). The feat of this book is that Williams makes the diurnal and fairly dull activities of an academic utterly riveting. How does he do it? By not being precious or pretentious about it, which is how so many other writers would have handled the material. Instead, Williams believes in the integrity of his hero, for whom nothing is easily achieved, or for that matter, very attractive. Even Stoner's honeymoon is a fairly squalid affair, and somehow, as bad as the story gets -- and it doesn't get bad in a dramatic or gimmicky way, just bad in the sense that Stoner never really experiences any joy in his life -- we keep reading. The book is grim, yes, and yet it will leave you feeling oddly enthralled. Read it.

On the first page of this fine novel the author tells us that the protagonist is a man of no particular esteem, a university professor who, after 38 years of teaching at the University of Missouri rose no higher than the lowly rank of Assistant Professor.

William Stoner came to the University of Missouri from a poor farm, became entranced by medieval and renaissance English literature and went on to get a PhD in that field. He was a shy man, and throughout his life had but two real friends. His wife was not one of those two. Within a couple of months of marriage Stoner realized his marriage was doomed to failure. Early on, a situation arose at the university in which Stoner, adhering to principle, earned the lifelong enmity of his department head. Another situation arose that offered Stoner a chance at happiness, and that failed.

One reviewer of this book wrote that he didn't see why anyone would want to read this book about a loser. But was he a loser? In an interview the author, John Williams, stated that he felt that Professor Stoner was a "hero." Surely this is a story of a man who really never got anywhere in life, his marriage was a failure, his parenting poor, and he never was really a vibrant member of the university faculty. Yet in some ways Stoner never gave up. Lacking innate teaching skills he worked hard at it, and became a popular teacher. He was never bitter, and, though struggling as a parent and father, he held on.


So there are two ways of looking at our "hero" or "loser." I found the book to be a wonderfully different view of a man's life. Certainly we can identify with him in some of our own failures, with our own wishes that maybe somethings in our lives might have been different. Then again, I don't read a book necessarily to find someone that I can identify with. I am intrigued by interesting lives that may be totally different from my life, or my fantasy life.

One final comment. I found the last 20 pages of this book to be heartbreaking. Being an older person myself, I am especially touched by the difficulties that age brings on. This is an excellent literary novel abounding with elegant writing. For me it was one of those books that I thought about for days after I finished it.

In this remarkable, overlooked work, John Williams chooses as his central character an undistinguished English professor (Stoner), who lives a largely uneventful life teaching at a drab Midwestern university. Neither Stoner's wife, nor his colleagues, nor his students think much of him. Yet the degree to which Williams succeeds in bringing the reader to identify with -- and care for -- his most unlikely protagonist is nothing short of a triumph. The final pages, in particular, are sad, transcendent, and unforgettable.

Stoner is a truly moving work. Its brilliance lies partly in its rectitude, partly in its discomfort and mostly in its artistry. As reviewers have accurately summed, the novel's ultimately about a man's stoicism (which sounds truly boring) and honor, but is really a meditation on individuality.

As an English teacher I'm encouraged to teach Ethan Frome to the students, and would much rather teach this novel for its depth, complexity and beauty

Please buy, read and pass this book on! (I am a Northerner, not a relative, yet simply a reader!)

This great novel chronicles the life of a man embodying that rare quality which Kenneth Rexroth described as "magnanimity". As we read of his difficulties and of the people in his life who constantly torment and betray him, the lower part of our nature continually cries out to this fictional character, "Get out,for God's sake! Just leave!" But of course it is just his refusal to "get out" which gives Stoner his longevity and nobility, and which redeems him in the final moments of his life (I can hardly ever remember being so moved by the closing pages of a novel.) Stoner is reminiscent of Ford Madox Ford's Christopher Tietjens, the center point of his tetralogy, PARADE'S END, another forgotten 20th century masterpiece. Like Tietjens, William Stoner refuses to cast off the liabilities of his life for any reason; in his review of the Ford novel for the Saturday Evening Post, Rexroth graced Tietjens with the summit of his own brand of critical praise (hard won indeed) by deeming him one of the last of the magnanimous men in literature. I hope that Rexroth had occasion to read "Stoner".

Every once in a while, a worthy but largely unknown novel registers on the literary radar screen and receives deserved attention. Dow Mossman's verbally hyperactive but extraordinary THE STONES OF SUMMER is one such example, rediscovered a few years ago by Mark Moskowitz's STONE READER documentary. John Williams's STONER is another, revitalized by Morris Dickstein's June 2007 paean in the New York Sunday Times Book Review. A thousand thanks, Mr. Dickstein - STONER is indeed a marvelous tale of American life and academia in the first half of the 20th Century.

Published in 1965, STONER was the second of Williams's three novels. Despite the date and serendipitous title, this is far from a beat or hippie generation story. To the contrary, hero William Stoner is a salt of the earth middle American, born and raised on a modest family farm in Missouri at the beginning of the 20th Century. Through intelligence, hard work, and good fortune, Stoner enters the University of Missouri to study modern agriculture. Williams presents his hero as a classically naïve farm boy, utterly awed by the buildings, the books, the other students, and the general aura of academe. All goes well until Stoner the freshman literature class of Archer Sloane. Despite being publicly embarrassed by Sloane for his inability to explain a Shakespearean sonnet about lost love (which also foreshadows his own later life), Stoner nevertheless discovers his true calling in literature. He changes majors, obtains his degree, and ultimately accepts a teaching position at his alma mater. One of his few good friends from the university, Dave Masters, subsequently describes the young Stoner with dead-on precision as "our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho" - prophetic words, indeed. Most of Stoner's subsequent troubles in his professorial life arise from his quixotic insistence on intellectual purity and refusal to play academic politics. Although it takes him far too many years to learn how to fight back, he eventually proves to have some modest skills at windmill-tilting.

STONER the book traces the surprisingly tempestuous arc of Stoner the man's outwardly mundane life: friendships made and lost to wartime death, the ups and downs in a marriage of sexually naïve co-equals, the birth of a daughter, the triumphs and despairs of professional life, and the petty jealousies and irrational retaliatory behaviors engendered by academic politics. Williams presents the story of an intellectual idealist, but ultimately it is a story of failure. Failure in the real world to prevent young men from wasteful deaths in two world wars and Korea, failure of a marriage, failure in holding on to a true love, failure to establish a stable family life (Stoner's is classically dysfunctional), and failure as an intellectual in his chosen field. Williams offers Stoner a sole mitigating success as a teacher where, despite difficult departmental odds, he finds a moderate degree of satisfaction and life purpose.

Williams writes in a noticeably direct, matter-of-fact, third-person style. He minces no words in describing his characters, creating an environment that is at once realistic yet inescapably sad. The reader can only feel empathy bordering on pity for Stoner, his wife Edith, and their unfortunate daughter Grace (about whom one can only remark the misfortune that we cannot choose our parents). At age 42, Stoner "...could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember." What a despairing statement about one's own life. Yet, in the end, Stoner achieves a modicum of satisfaction and self-realization even as he surveys the unrealized expectations and potentialities of a life not so badly lived. He is a tragic hero, but a hero still and all. And a surprisingly likable one at that.

This book defies easy categorization. It's about the son of hardscrabble and proud farmers who goes to college just before WWI to learn modern farming techniques; instead he discovers he has a facility for book learning. He becomes a professor of literature but his life is an unhappy one: he marries a woman who turns out to be cold and unresponsive; he dotes on his daughter, but his wife alienates her and the daughter later becomes pregnant to get away, and becomes an alcoholic; he offends the college dean and his career is thwarted. His one chance at happiness is an affair that too is doomed. As grim as it is, the novel is oddly compelling; it's not kind to academic life. Stoner seems caught by his nature; the times; the place; a failure of will. He seems to have no real control of his destiny. Nor does his love of literature appear to give any direction to his life. His is a bleak, hard life. He's caught and can't - or won't -escape. "The unexamined life is not worth living."

I read this book because of previously having read the author's "Augustus" (also reviewed on Amazon). "Augustus" is so impressive, that I expected an equally outstanding performance in this book. If anything, this novel exceeded even my lofty expecatations. The interesting thing is how different this novel is in form and substance from the author's historical novel on the first true Roman emperor. "Augustus" is told through documents; "Stoner" develops through a straight narrative, with prose so lean, "plain" and effective it is truly remarkable. The focus here is not ancient Rome, but the University of Missouri in the first half of the 20th century. Augustus as an emperor is exceedingly successful; Stone at the end of his life is not sure it was worthwhile. Yet, "Stoner" works at least as well as a novel as does "Augustus." On top of that, it has one important ingredient not found in the other novel--this book will touch you someplace along the line, believe me. Stoner, the central chracter, is somebody you will think about and judge throughout the novel, and even thereafter. Was he a pathetic wimp, or did he have his priorities in line, or did he just take the course of least resistance at critical junctures in his life? Superbly written, carefully constructed, authentic in detail (since the author had spent time at the U. of Mo. himself (Ph.D. 1954)), this is just an amazingly effective novel. It also raises some interesting questions about the role of University teaching and those who practice it.

Ever wonder why the most eccentric teachers were precisely the ones who inspired you the most?

I have to admit that when a friend first recommended this "novel from the sixties about a teacher in a university English department," with the title "Stoner," I had an image of Elliot Gould in sideburns and army camo jacket lighting up a joint with dazed, anti-war students and/or hippies.

Originally published in 1965, this novel was a sleeper classic. Not as well publicized as books by contemporary writers (Salinger, Mailer, Heller, Roth, Bellow, et. al.), Williams' novel is rather a calm, but emotionally powerful, finely detailed portrait of a gentle academic soul from an earlier generation.

Writing in the clean, spare, down-to-earth voice of the Midwest, Williams gives us what he calls "an escape into reality," that reality being the teaching career and complete adult life of Professor William Stoner: his overarching love of literature and teaching, a loveless marriage, and his struggles in not-so-benign Academia. Portraits of the novel's minor characters are also sharply drawn, like Stoner's emotionally frigid wife, Edith, or his nemesis, Hollis Lomax, the hunchback head of the English department with matinee idol face.

Besides Stoner and scholarly writings on Renaissance poetry, John Williams published two volumes of his own poetry and three other novels, each in a totally different setting and genre: the 1973 National Book Award-winning Augustus, Nothing But the Night, and even a western called Butcher's Crossing.

Personally, after reading Stoner, I am eager to "discover" his other novels. Williams' use of language is superb in its clarity and not to be missed.

Warning: Skip the novel's "Introduction" by John McGahern until after reading the novel. It's a plot-spoiler, totally misplaced and near-superfluous.

By now the readers of these reviews should have a good sense of what this novel is about: very little. A sweet, shy farm boy goes off to college, switches from ag school to a&s, studying literature; he stays on to take a Ph.D., is hired by his school and begins a life of teaching. He marries, ecstatically at first, but, soon, tragically, has a contretemps with his department head that lasts for twenty years, has an affair with a junior colleague, loses her under pressure from the embittered chairman and weak but friendly dean, settles in to a largely successful teaching career, sees his beloved daughter escape from his wife and home through unmarried pregnancy and eventually dies, as the one book that he has written falls from his hand into the silence. This is not a million laughs.

The novel as a form has been successful for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the novel broke with the literature of the renaissance in demonstrating that the life (both interior and exterior) of an average individual (=a middle class individual) could be compelling and instructive. This is, quintessentially, Stoner. His simple, sad life is told in a compelling narrative that is extremely engaging and his emotional life is charted with the intensity of an action/adventure film.

Thoreau said that all men lead lives of quiet desperation. Certainly, the characters in Stoner all do. The desperation is not, however, period-specific. The narrative spans the period of two wars and the great depression but there is none of the alienation of high modernism or the existential angst that often marks the works of this period. We are on the plains in central Missouri and life is hard enough without any European or Hollywood overtones. Life itself is struggle and if Stoner is subjected to the punishments of his embittered, troll-like department head, he is spared service in combat as well as the life on the farm to which his father and mother eventually succumb.

The book is very, very sad, but it has glimmering moments and Stoner's personal form of courage (which may not always serve his best interests) stands as a small but inspiring monument to the human spirit. The most striking aspect of the novel, to me, is the absence of religious faith--whether as a force for hope and grace or as a force that fails in times of greatest need. It is simply absent and its absence is not felt (as it is, e.g., in The Great Gatsby). This strikes me as a curious but interesting aspect of a novel set in this place and at this time. Bill Stoner could have used its help. The world of the novel, however, is too stark for the introduction of religious, indeed, even vaguely 'spiritual' realities to intrude. If Edward Hopper had set out to write a great novel of the midwest, it would look and sound exactly like this. James Ellroy sometimes uses the phrase 'tragic realism' to describe certain forms of fiction. Here it fits. This is a very important book, but steel your mind for the experience before you embark upon it.