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.
