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The Remarkable Unremarkableness of William Stoner
In a rush to create a memorable character everyone thinks they have to design a deluge of eccentric characteristics and quirky flaws. Stoner is the antidote to this, proving the remarkable can lie in the unremarkable.
It’s 1 am. I’ve just finished reading Stoner, John Williams’ posthumous classic for the second time. I can’t sleep. How can I knowing I’ve been touched so heartily by a character who now exists more in my soul than in those tender pages which reveal his broken but wholesome life? For that’s the true achievement of Stoner, the deft creation of a character who defies comparison with his gentle ordinariness and manages to burrow his way into your heart nonetheless.
Occasionally when you consume a story you’re invested in the character’s lives, in their journeys, so much so you walk away thinking, ‘oh, wow!’ — and thereafter you look back fondly, nostalgically remarking on the change it’s insighted within you. Stoner doesn’t do this. Stoner is a portrait of naivety and affability without pretence whose genius lies in its simple ability to make you fall in love with the titular character.
In this way, Williams’ novel cannot be said to grab you from page one; it’s no wild ride or edge of your seat crowd pleaser. It’s an experience like a slowly warming embrace, perhaps a little awkward at first, but by the end, you're so contentedly wrapped in those delicate arms you could hardly wish to be anywhere else.
What hooks you is Stoner’s simple innocence, his quaint and unassailable manner; his integrity to witness life as a passive vessel of himself that he produces a profound yearning in the reader. Characters who act and try and strive we can get behind. They’re so omnipresent in storytelling so as to leave people thinking that a story cannot exist without them. And yet here’s Stoner. A hero who doesn’t act, doesn’t win, doesn’t stand up where he should and in the end bows to the strength of others. It’s in this quiet obsequence, this affable reliability that the reader is deeply endeared to him. A unique yearning is triggered, whereby all those who come to love Stoner’s story with anticipatory fingertips at the…
