Book Review: 'Stoner' by John Williams

When it comes to titles of books that have not aged well, this one has to be up there with Nietzsche’s 'The Gay Science'. When it was suggested to me by a goodreads friend, I thought that he must’ve found out about my thing for ‘The Big Lebowski’...

But it turns out to be the surname of the protagonist, one William Stoner, who shares attributes with the author of the book, John Williams, e.g. insofar as being a long-term academic in an American Department of English ... so much so that there is a much more strident than normal warning-cum-dedication from the author to his former colleagues at the University of Missouri to the tune of ‘this is fictional, and I’m not taking the piss out of any of you...’ It is a book that is easy to read and strangely affecting. I cried at the end. But what these tears were for is hard to say. And I find myself thinking about Stoner at odd times of the day. Was it because of people I have known? My own (albeit even less grand) experience as a doctoral student in what passes for an English department at the turn of the millennium in Australia? Just the purity of the prose and its vision? Maybe all these things and more. It’s certainly a kind of porn-for-literati what Williams throws on the page: literature about loving literature and cherishing it and valuing it, and its learning.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it was illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

And, in the end, the book is about Meaning ... which is kind of weak to say, since I suppose everything is, in the end, but it’s appropriate, since it touches on the idea of Meaning-making. Two world wars go on in the background of Stoner’s life, and much Meaning was being made there, but Williams explores the extraordinary in the ordinary, and even a kind of ordinary that is often decked in failure and disappointment.

...in the long run, all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness that did not alter.

In the shorter term, there was recourse to learning, and there was literature for that, something that:

...changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence on it.

There’s no classic victory for Stoner, not in career, marriage, love, family ... nothing. His efforts were futile. The results, empty. And he diminishes into nothingness. The end.

   

But, of course, the book is also curiously uplifting, in just the right sort of ordinary ways. There is a presence in being a presence, and there is the joy of being alive, knowing you are alive, proclaiming it through all the different ways you are capable—through lust, through learning—that you: are.

He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

The intensity of his practical involvement with language and learning, his passion and spirit for it, and then the tension of trying to communicate this to others, through words—‘...knowing something through words that could not be put in words...’—is foremost throughout his life, and the agony of coming to terms with our imperfect faculties to do this. His inadequacy is all of our inadequacies. I mean, just writing this simple review and trying to imbue it with what I want it to have in it is just another feeble example. All this hot and living stuff is there, right there, just as for Stoner ... but, then:

What was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in the utterance.

Williams wrote this in the mid 60s, and his timing was probably poor. One can’t but help to consider his placement of Stoner back as a freshman in 1910 as some kind of review of the Academy he found himself in after his post WW2 undergraduate years. When Stoner is being leant on to pass a student called Walker who deserves to be failed, he digs his heels in. Departmental politics, professional threats and even the acknowledged futility of the gesture are not enough to persuade him otherwise.

”We can’t keep the Walkers out.”

He’s told. And they can’t. And they don’t.

Walker is a great talker, his rhetoric is fast and full and dripping, and he can skirt around the generalities of literature and English with slimy ease. But he knows nothing about the works themselves. He hasn’t really read anything ... except what has been written ABOUT them. Stoner is shocked that Walker had got to postgraduate level in English without any Greek or Latin or German or French. And they didn’t keep the Walkers out. My English departments are all post-Walker. And I kind of wish I could have had a shot at Stoner’s pre-Walker time. I cruised through, enjoying what I was doing, and getting great results and scholarships, but I was never really pressed. Not like Stoner and his ilk were. Chaucer and Beowulf? Not in translation? What? And how they get Stoner, with a reputation smear claiming he was opposed to Walker because of his physical disability would’ve been even worse today. It might have trended on Twitter, if no lions had been shot that week, and Huff Post could’ve done a feature on disability prejudice. And then his affair with a female student. Facebook would’ve been burning with Jezebel op-eds, and Mamamia could’ve followed on the currency-ebb with a Top Five Things we Hate about Stoner.

   

 Was Williams seeing this develop in the 60s, and pitching the Walker back to the 30s as the worm inside the fruit? Williams is also a beautiful stylist with a deep sensibility. He has the capacity, through Stoner, to bring the humanity and shared human plight out of even the least likable characters, such as Lomax, Walker and Edith (Stoner’s wife). His touches with character and scene are deft and full of meaning. His similes seem to ring like tuning forks.

...the man’s eyes were gray and flat like pieces of glazed crockery.

He is a writer’s writer for a reader’s reader. And his openness and subtlety rescues him from any sense of stuffiness or ‘in’ effect.

   

 It is nice to think that Williams’ work has been rescued. This book sold only 2000 copies and went out of print quickly. And he died in 1985. Stoner’s last living act is to pick up and hold on to his own failed book, and, when he dies, it ‘...fell into the silence of the room.’

 The room remains silent, but Stoner has been picked back up.

 And this is true and good and beautiful.