Book Review: Stoner by John Williams
The book that feels as if I’ve clicked the “Refresh” button on myself.
This book was a secret find and that isn’t the reason why it has become such a special one to me. My encounter with it has brought about a very novel and precious experience it almost felt like in the time we’ve spent together, we had shared the same heartbeat.
The story follows a man, Stoner, from his childhood to his death. Between the two permanent markers of life and death, the book recounts what Stoner goes through physically and mentally.
I heard somewhere that there are two kinds of books in the world. There is the kind you read for the story, and then there is the kind you read for its language. “Stoner” is one for the language. It is the most mundane of stories, yet it is deeply mesmerizing. It brought me, from start to finish, a sense of innocence, clarity and liveliness in the most alluring way. In it, I’ve found that a simple life can be an immensely beautiful life.
“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
I cannot explain fully why this book holds such great weight to me but the experience of it had me holding my breath, feeling the quickening pulse of my heart and releasing a huge sigh from the awe that came from it all. I found myself in anger, sadness and grief as the story moved along. It reminded me once more of something I heard about the process of ingesting a story — it is one that involves both the writer and the reader. The writer cannot put into the reader a certain emotion, he/she sure as hell can try, but what will come out of this interaction requires that the reader dance along to the music composed by the writer in the reader’s own way and the resulting experience, good or bad, is a product of this interaction. With “Stoner”, the dance has been a pretty darn graceful one.
In the most precious of ways, “Stoner” had made me felt understood. In particular, how the concept of love was being explored here spoke to me like a dream turned into a resounding reality.
Again and again, like many others, I have tried to define what exactly love is. Is it something written in the stars? Why do they appear to be more accessible to some but not others? Is monogamy too much to ask of someone?
“Stoner” provides no answer and to no surprise, it had made it clear that love holds no particular definition in any way. It differs from person to person and even for a single being, the meaning of love evolved through the stages of life. First, it might be something we thought of as a random privilege — that if we’re just lucky enough, we might find ourselves “in love”. As we move through life, this idea morphed into something that is in equal part idealistic and equal part a state we work to arrive at — that upon arrival, one is destined for a life of happiness. It might only be later as we mature that we realize love is not an absolute state. In my limited capacity, I have decided that it is a form of “choosing” that needs to be done every day. Does this then make me somewhat of a realist now?
Stoner saw it (love) as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
If I could make this a little romantic, then might I say, “Stoner” could just be the book equivalent of a “first love” in all its varied forms and heart-fluttering nuances. And like all first loves, you just can’t be who you were before the encounter.
