A Stoic Hero for Everyman
If you love books, you will love Stoner, a bildungsroman of bibliophile. John Williams’ spare prose plows into the interior life of William Stoner, a man of plain soil, raised on a hardscrabble central Missouri farm. A man who faces life without delusion or despair, he sees the plain sense of things. Stoner’s prose embodies the the very virtues it espouses.
And literature transformed Stoner’s life:
He let his fingers rifle through the pages and felt a tingling, as if those pages were alive. The tingling came through his fingers and coursed through his flesh and bone; he was was minutely aware of it, and he waited until it contained him, until the old excitement that was like a terror fixed him where he lay.
At nineteen Stoner went to the nearby university to study farming at the new new agricultural school. The daily activities of university life became his asylum in the wilderness. Stoner arrived on campus in 1910 and never left. For all 46 years, Stoner battled his awkward American inarticulateness. He tried to bridge the gap between how literature made him feel and how he could express that feeling.
Williams begins his novel with a downbeat two paragraph obituary of Stoner’s unremarkable life. William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom uses the same pre-summary device, but Faulkner intrigues the reader with Quentin’s schizophrenic account of the Sutpen family tragedy. Williams starts on the lowest, plainest note. From there he slowly builds his symphony to a heartbreaking allegretto.
Stoner failed at everything. He never rose above assistant professor, his marriage failed from the start, his one hope — his daughter — was dashed by his bi-polar wife, and he let the love of his life ride out of town. Career, marriage, family, friendships failed. He had two friends — one died in the great war and the other remained aloof. He had hoped for a friendship with another professor, but the other professor coldly rebuffed his advances. He sacrificed all for his pursuit of literature.
Dispassionently, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be...
And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and 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?
What did you expect? he asked himself.
His final review doesn’t recount his daughter, Grace. When she was a young girl he bonded with her, but then his wife stole her from him. He bought Grace little desk so she could work in his study, his wife moved it out. He saved money to send her to a school out east, his wife decided Grace would spend the money on a wardrobe. Naturally, Grace got pregnant to escape from the prison her parents built her.
Stoner’s own taboo love affair takes place at the start of the final third of the novel and the final third of his life. The affair releases the passion and love he’d been denied. The passion he repressed. He enjoys a year of bliss before the mores of the society and his rival’s maneuvering bring it to an end.
They were both very shy, and they knew each other slowly, tentatively; they came close and drew apart, they touched and withdrew, neither wishing to impose upon the other more than might be welcomed. Day by day the layers of reserve that protected them dropped away, so that at last they were like many who are extraordinarily shy, each open to the other, unprotected, perfectly and unconsciously at ease.
Williams ends with final blow to the reader and kills his darling. The final antagonist is faceless, but the other two antagonists, Edith and Lomax, the department chair, face the reader with their own deformities. Williams describes Lomax as a cripple and Lomax’s rift with Stoner arises from Lomax’s defense of another crippled graduate student. Edith appears to have bi-polar or some other disorder that wrecks havoc on both their lives.
In the end, all his other sacrifices and failures do not matter. He’s devoted his life to that tingling and the terror his fingers feel from the page. Striping out all the noise, finding a plain sense of things, relegates this novel to book lovers. Stoner doesn’t have the movie star drama of a Jay Gatsby or a Fredrick Henry. He doesn’t amass a fortune or drive an ambulance in a war, but his simple, determined life in the midst of the wilderness makes Stoner the post-modern hero: an ordinary man with an extraordinary life.
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