How can you do it, John Williams? It's just not right. You open this novel, and in the first paragraph you tell us everything. You give us our character, William Stoner. You tell us his whole life in just a couple of sentences. And in the end, he's barely remembered by his colleagues. That's all there is to him.
What? How can you do that? How can you start one of the most celebrated stories of the 20th Century like that, John Williams?
- First sentence:
- Stoner goes to university, aged 19.
- Second:
- He gets his PhD 8 years later, at the height of World War 1
- … and works at the university until his death.
- Third:
- He was never really promoted.
- Few students remembered him.
- Fourth:
- He dies.
- And he's memorialised with a rare manuscript.
That's it.
Paragraph two does the summary even more briskly:
An occasional student who comes upon the name may remember idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question.
Blunt. Wow.
A completely unremarkable man who is the profound beating heart of one of the best novels of the 20th Century.
What? Come on now, Mr Williams.
William Stoner is a wholly different main character. He is neither a hero nor a villain, he's just a very ordinary man, entirely human. He tries to lead a good life, a life of sincerity and integrity without needing to set the world aflame, that's all.
He is just a simple man, and that's at the core of what makes this such an exceptional book.
William Stoner's life is ordinary, and that is exactly what allows us as readers to glimpse what it means to be decent and show us how to find meaning for ourselves. Even in difficulties, even in disappointments, Stoner shows us how to see beauty.
Stoner grows up a farming son in rural Missouri. His father encourages him to go to the state university, to study agriculture. At university, though, he takes an English course and encounters Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 73 about aging. He falls in love with literature and transfers to the humanities.
Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
pg. 25
Two of Stoner's student friends, Masters and Finch, enlist and go off to fight in World War I, but he stays behind to teach at the faculty. Eventually he gains his doctorate, the war ends, but it has taken Masters and only Finch returns.
He falls in love with Edith, and despite her initial coldness they marry. They have a daughter but Edith is bedridden for a year and eschews motherhood. Their marriage is increasingly strained, she leaves raising their daughter to him. Stoner realises she is manipulating a wedge between father and daughter.
Stoner's working life suffers great strains, and we have a long and savage narrative of his feud with Lomax, the man who eventually becomes departmental Chair. Later in life, he has a happy affair with Katherine, a PhD student.
In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.
pg. 199
Lomax discovers it and makes threats to them both. Painfully, they separate, and eventually Katherine leaves the department.
In later life, he is a departmental legend, a respected teacher. He prepares for retirement and wants to complete a few last years, but Lomax tries to push him out early. Stoner discovers cancer, his symptoms worsen and force him to leave. His final years are filled with extreme pain from the disease, but he reflects on whether he could have done more, he has regrets but he also accepts that he has done his best.
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.
…
There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
pg. 287
Good things happen to Stoner and so much ends badly, yet he has endured and the world is bigger because William Stoner has lived in it.
It takes a very special kind of writer to lend us a character such as Stoner.
He is no Jack Reacher, he's no George Smiley, has no powers beyond those of us regular folks. He is an ordinary man, but I read his story and I am enraptured by him.
Although he is so very specific, and his life as an academic may appear at first sight alien to most, his experience of life — disappointment and pain in love, diligence and struggle at work, illness, suffering, and overcoming all with dignity — may make him, in truth, a greater hero than all.
Workplace novels, academia novels particularly, often focus on the rivalries, the egos, the combat, and frequently through the medium of satire (Amis's Luck Jim, for example). Not so here, and William's story soars towards perfection in a novel so very beautiful and so deeply moving.
In the story of his life, John Williams gives Stoner to us with all his simplicity, all his suffering and pain, and I am all the better for it. Stoner shows me his world, and in it I can see how to live a truly good life.
Much of the novel mirrors John Williams's own life. He also worked in the Department of English at the University of Missouri, though in the book's dedication to his former colleagues he says explicitly it is a 'work of fiction'. He also experienced workplace frustrations with colleagues.
The story of book itself echoes somehow the life of the protagonist. On publication, his agent, clearly admiring it, warned him not to get his hopes up. It sold, but was not a huge success and slowly drifted into the backwaters until it was republished by Vintage in 2003, had a powerful review in the New York Times in 2007 (Morris Dickstein: 'The Inner Lives of Men'), and by 2013 it had found a new audience who discovered in it a beauty that 'takes your breath away'.
There's not yet been a film or TV version, though it would seem it was optioned for a movie in 2015, starring Casey Affleck, but is currently stuck 'in development'.
It's over 60 years since Stoner was published. In that time it's lost none of its power or its beauty, and still speaks with sublime eloquence to the purposefulness and power of an ordinary life.
This may be one of those rarest of things — a perfect book.
Get yourself a copy, delight in every page, and at the end you will find yourself a better person.