Stoner by John Williams
A campus novel about the life of an unremarkable man.
Finished: 4 October 2021
Rating: ★★★★☆
How long a life is too long,
as I take my time from here to there, the one world
dried-out distances, nose, horn, my great head lifted down,
the tonnage of my heart almost more than I can carry.
— Stanley Plumly, “White Rhino”
So often we read to escape, and sometimes this escape can be a good thing where it allows us to dream and live beyond ourselves in the hope that the beyond might someday arrive. But that someday never comes for the eponymous William Stoner, and this is the brutal truth for most of us. Death lays claim to our lives before we do. But where some might see Stoner as heroic, including the author himself, I am of a different mind.
Stoner finds small joys where he can, but life still disappoints. Things happen to him and he looks upon them with mild surprise. Intensely lonely, he moves as through a fog, fumbling towards dim desires. Though he comes from a line of farmers, he falls in love with literature at college and becomes an academic. And while it is admirable the way in which he sticks to his principles and, bullishly, puts his head down and gets on with it, he is ultimately battered by life’s tides, resigned to a Stoic endurance that lacks in the agency that that kind of Stoicism should bring. Yes, he battles almost heroically with a colleague who wants to ruin him, and yes, he embarks on an affair in which he learns love and intimacy for the first time. John Williams himself considered Stoner “a real hero” who “had a very good life … a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing … The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner’s sense of a job … a job in the good and honourable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was.”
I think that’s true to an extent. The beauty and emotion of this novel is that Stoner’s despair is our own. Stoner’s life is the epitome of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation”. He seeks what we all desire: fulfilment, love, companionship. He misses the mark on most of those things but he seizes upon and fights for an occupation that matters to him. Many people don’t manage to find any purpose in their work. Stoner also has moments of joy, however fleeting, and he recognises them for what they are. In those moments, he is heroic. The world is indifferent to us, and he tries to eke out of this indifference a life he might look upon with something like pride. Many aren’t even aware enough to realise what their lives are, to direct what their lives might be.
But Stoner’s failure — and this is what I find tragic — is that he isn’t quite bold enough to fight for his daughter, Grace. He retreats into his career as a final defence against his wife, Edith, as a place to which he can escape. And it’s wonderful that he finds such fulfilment in his work, but to do so at the cost of another person’s life doesn’t sit well. It is, in large part, his lack of intervention with Edith’s manipulations that leads Grace to take extreme measures to escape not only the family but also herself. Like a domino effect, other lives are ruined. This isn’t primarily a question of cause or blame, but rather of responsibility. Stoner simply isn’t in sufficient possession of himself to take the reins. He is passive.
There’s a remarkable passage when Stoner realises that his daughter is an alcoholic: “And Stoner came to realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.” Once, when Grace was a child, she and Stoner had camaraderie and connection. When Edith took this away, Stoner fled emotionally. He admitted defeat and withdrew from Grace. And, near the end of his life, he realises he has nothing to say to Grace. Would a hero not rise to that? Why is the academic battle he ‘wins’ supposed to be so much more good and honourable and worthwhile than the battle in which he loses his daughter, and she loses herself?
While many have lives far worse than Stoner’s, I can’t call him “a real hero”. If anything, he is a perfect illustration of how we adapt to the confines of our perceived lives and resign ourselves to living within those borders. Sure, that’s reality, and we shouldn’t live in deception. And how we could we expect to know any better, to be any more self-aware than Stoner? But how devastating it is not to be. If this is our modern day image of the hero — an image that we’re not meant to reach but is something to aspire to — then that saddens me.
So rather than read Stoner as a heroic tale, I see it as cautionary. It is still deeply empathetic — it holds a mirror to ourselves and shows us ways to survive that are, simultaneously, also ways not to live. For that, I think it’s brilliant.