Stoner: A Book Review

It has been a while since I finished a book in one sitting—it is not that doing so is a luxury but that there are at least two other skill issues at work in my case. One of them is obvious: my attention, like most of yours, has been short-circuited to the point that reading a book in a single sitting feels nigh on impossible despite doing it routinely as a teenager. Where is my phone!?

The other issue is that a lot of my reading over the last decade has been for research. This is best done by nonlinearly reading documents, where I sample parts of their introductory section then jump to the conclusion; if needed, I read other parts on methodology and findings. This is for the deeper understanding needed for a specific research output but when I am working on a proposal, I often bounce between various information sources; this helps me assemble a narrative understanding of a field, its gaps, and opportunities for progress.

This second kind of reading has really taken its toll on my ability to read linearly, which is how one reads a fiction book. Then, there is the challenge of being able to read excellent prose and recognise it as such.

John Williams’ Stoner contains the kind of prose that is so simple yet so elegantly effective throughout that it is the closest I have come to breaking the curse of single-sit book completion, during a flight from Copenhagen to San Francisco.

But when I got to the final chapter, I decided not to finish it in-flight.

The first page of this book left such an impression on me that I knew this was going to join the ranks of books I will repeatedly revisit over the course of my life, either a few end-to-end readings, or by sampling parts of it like a reference book. I don’t think I have laughed as hard as I did reading the first couple paragraphs of a book. It led me to believe that William Stoner’s life would be portrayed as a comedy—and in some ways, one could say that it is. But what starts off as a gently humorous description of Stoner’s early years at university instead turns into a tragicomedy, eventually becoming one of the most beautiful narratives of romance, tender love, and optimism.

Williams precedes Mohsin Hamid by a few decades but his pacing of Stoner reminded me of Exit West, which I read some years ago. The eponymous Stoner’s love for Katherine is described with a similarly sweet tenderness to that of Nadia’s and Saeed’s in Exit West—their intoxication is one we might all wish to feel in our lives—but Williams’ and Hamid’s outstanding craft in their novels really shines through in their ability to sweep through vast swathes of their lead character’s lives in under a page, at times. Even though their books are set in a world bound by ordinary physics and politics¹, the two are, to me, masters of time travel. They use this ability to draw out long conversations to develop character but also leverage an economy of words to smoothly move the plot along without compromising the drama itself. This mastery lets them reveal how an ordinary life accumulates meaning—not through dramatic moments, which they compress, but through the mundane details they linger on.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Stoner dies in this novel; that is revealed in the first paragraph².

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: ‘Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.’

By the end of the second paragraph, I was cracking up.

An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

It’s possible I found this passage hilarious due to Williams’ version of 1960s academia being not too different from its current state. I didn’t have an internet connection on the plane, so I was unsure if Williams was an academic insider—I confirmed later that he was—but my doubt diminished when I read Dave Masters’ commentary directed at Stoner and Gordon Finch, another classmate. It is incredible in its entirety but this gem on some of their common traits as academics who will never leave the institution is outrageously true.

But you’re bright enough—and just bright enough—to realize what would happen to you in the world. You’re cut out for failure, and you know it. Though you’re capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you’re not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you’re not precisely the most honest man I’ve ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you’re capable of work, but you’re just lazy enough so that you can’t work as hard as the world would want you to.

The jocular nature of the book descends into the tale of a stoic Stoner, who displays a patience—one I can only describe as a compassionate Buddhist detachment—with the long-term consequences of choosing to marry an ill-fitting partner, Edith. It is perhaps why he offers little resistance to her throughout their marriage, wading through many moments without an ego. His vulnerability and undiminished capacity for love emerges eventually in a romance that also brings a lightness and joy to his life; the kinds of things he had once hoped for but had stopped believing in.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion.

This description of love being “the heaven of a false religion” is haunting on its own but by the time you reach that line, it just hits a little too hard. It’s why I become so happy and optimistic when Katherine enters his life.

Without revealing the details of how the rest of the book unfolds, a lot of the time I wondered if the book was perhaps largely autobiographical. There are the superficial similarities; Williams’ Wikipedia page revealed to me that he, much like Stoner, came from a farming family and received his doctorate from the University of Missouri. The expositions on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Medieval English seemed to carry a feeling that made me think that Williams was not only in an English department but also shared an appreciation for what he taught, like Stoner.

Williams conveys that Stoner’s colleagues see him as unambitious. Of course, this is not too different from how contemporary academics might see a Stoner-like figure; but the grander pattern is that institutional measures of success have always been orthogonal to actual human value. That Stoner remains consistent and uncompromising in his values does not come as a shock and is, perhaps, why his career and life plays out in a way that most around him deem unremarkable. There are multiple examples of where his lack of belief in hierarchies is mistaken for a lack of ambition in climbing a ladder; for example, he holds firm on his decision to not pass a doctoral student in an exam despite academic pressure. He is also consistent in not making things difficult for others in his personal life. While leaving Edith is an option, it is obvious that the ramifications of this would be suffered by their daughter, Grace. His choice here should not be mistaken as an indicator of his passive acceptance of his fate but of his magnanimity to not make things worse for Grace.

Stoner’s not a book of surprises and cheap twists; it’s heartfelt but pragmatic. It’s also beautifully written prose that leaves me with the question of what makes a life remarkable. If having the capacity to teach what you love and beget love from that, even if it’s impermanent, is not a life worth living, then I know of little else that is.

I want to thank cookiecarver for suggesting this book to me.