Sunday 22 July 2018

Book of the Month: Stoner (John Williams)


Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American author, John Williams, who published only four novels in his life, none of which sold well (although the last one, Augustus, won the US National Book Award in 1973, the first time in the history of the National Book Award, when the award was jointly shared by two novels). After Augustus, Williams, a professor of English in Denver, Colorado, did not publish any novel for the remaining 21 years of his life.

Stoner was Williams’s third novel. First published in 1965, the novel attracted modestly favourable critical reviews; did not sell much; and sank into obscurity. It was re-published in 2013, almost fifty years after its original not-very-successful publication (and nineteen years after Williams’s death); and guess what? It is now heralded as some sort of classic.

The eponymous hero of Williams’s novel is William Stoner. Stoner is born to impoverished farmers in central Missouri, near Columbia. In 1910, at the age of nineteen Stoner enters the University of Missouri as a freshman. He stays at the university for the next four decades, until his death of cancer, in 1956. He does not rise beyond the rank of the Assistant Professor (not because he can’t cut the mustard, I shall request you to keep in mind, but because of departmental politics), and is not particularly renowned for his teaching method. He marries Edith, who has the kind of personality that would keep a Freudian analyst in business for years, and produces a daughter named Grace. Stoner’s career, like Greece’s economy, does not go anywhere; his marriage is not happy; and his daughter turns out to be a disappointment. Stoner takes an occasional initiative, like having an affair with a departmental colleague, a woman named Katherine Driscoll, who is several years his junior; but, does not have the courage to take it to its conclusion (although he loves with as much passion as his nature would allow) and lets her go, sinking back into the ennui of his dispiriting marriage and job. As he is nearing his retirement (his boss, Lomax, with whom Stoner has been forced to wage a long war of attrition, for reasons that are laughably trivial, can’t wait to send Stoner on his way) Stoner develops intestinal cancer. It would have been an injustice to Stoner’s sad life—with its sad trajectory until then—if the cancer were treatable. It isn’t; and Stoner, on the last page of the novel, dies.

Stoner is a novel about an unremarkable farm-boy, who goes to college and becomes a teacher. Nothing of real significance happens in his life, which, by conventional standards, occupies the position between failure and disappointment.

The problem with Stoner is that its protagonist does not come to life. He lives no impression as you close the novel. Nothing about his personality or behaviour or attitude either stands out. His inner life, emotional ambience of his mind, if you will, is never lit up. The guy, as the cliché goes, is dull as ditchwater. His motivations remain largely obscure. Take his marriage to Edith, whom he sees for the first time at a University party. The woman is colder than the Antarctic. It is not clear what her attraction is to Stoner, what it is that drives him towards the woman other than an innate trait of masochism. (Equally, why Edith, the daughter of a rich banker—the father would, predictably, lose his wealth in the Great Depression of the 1930s and—yawn, yawn—kill himself; but that is, at the time of Edith’s first meeting with Stoner, is decades away—decides to marry Stoner, who was financially never going to be able to match her parents’ wealth on his University salary, and, who has nothing whatsoever about him raising him above the mediocrity, is left unexplained.) Williams spends good many pages describing Edith’s erratic behaviour most, if not all of which is, it is strongly hinted, directed at  making Stoner’s life a misery and driving a wedge between him and their daughter, Grace. Yet, Edith’s motivations remain obscure. Is she nasty? Is she just on this side of madness? I couldn’t care. Then there’s Stoner’s great feud with Lomax, the physically handicapped chairman of the department. It all starts with some shyster student, also physically challenged, who Lomax thinks is the next Samuel Johnson, while Stoner thinks he is a waste of space. Stoner, despite urging from Lomax, fails the shyster. That puts paid to Stoner’s ambitions—if he has any—of becoming a professor of English. He then, as is in the nature of these things, starts shagging a younger colleague, who, going by her behaviour, seems to have a striking similarity to the temperament of Stoner’s wife Edith, in that it is not based on a  series of good and bad days, but good and abd moments.. The affair limps on for a few months. Edith becomes aware of it, but, curiously, is not bothered. The affair ends when Lomax tries to . . . I have actually forgotten what it is that Lomax attempts; however, the upshot is Katherine Driscoll packs her bags and leaves. Stoner watches her go and . . . well, that’s about it: the character of Katherine Driscoll has served whatever obscure purpose Williams has in mind for her, and she is banished out of the story. As regards Stoner’s daughter, Grace, it would have been a miracle if a child brought up by two oddballs—an alexithymic father with water instead of blood in his veins, and a mother who is so caricaturesque, she couldn’t be real—turned out to be a well-adjusted personality. Grace doesn’t. She gets her bun in the oven at a young age; forces the hapless boy to marry her; the boy has the decency to die in the Second World War; and Grace becomes an alcoholic.

Stoner, a novel about an obscure American academic (not unlike its creator) in the first half of twentieth century, who endures a series of personal and professional misfortunes (at least some of which are self-inflicted), it would be fair to say, is not a joyous novel. I don’t have a problem with that. My problem with the novel is: I did not find it riveting. Stoner, rather than coming across as a man who embraces whatever shit life throws at him (and there is a lot of it, let’s face it) with the equanimity and stoicism of a Yoga practitioner (or a recovering alcoholic), which, I suspect, is the author’s intention, comes across as a man constitutionally enervated of vitality. There aren’t any depths here that deserve prolonged attention.

Williams’s prose is precise and adequate, and, like the protagonist of the novel, bloodless. You feel indifferent to it, perhaps because it is indifferent to the man it depicts. It is monotonous and never shifts out of the slow lane. Stoner is a man of few words, but you do not get the feeling that he selects his words judiciously and delivers them expertly; rather he comes across as a dull man who has, for the most part, nothing interesting to say.

Stoner is not a bad novel, but I can’t understand what all the fuss is about.