Book Review: Stoner by John Williams

Stoner by John Williams has been on my radar for a while now. At first, I thought it was another one of those roadtrip novels of the sixties and seventies, something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or On the Road, which to be perfectly honest, I have no interest in. But then I watched Jack Edwards talk about it, and the main character’s love of books and literature, how he uses it as an escape, and I thought — oh, that’s exactly my kind of book. 

So, I put the special edition of it (pictured on the photo above) on my birthday wish list and it was the first one of the many I received (what else do you get a book lover?) that I started reading.

And it started off pretty well, I have to say. I have a soft spot for books about sad men that love to read (A Single Man is still one of my favorites), and I assumed that’s what this would be. We learn about Stoner in an inverted way — first of his death and legacy (unremarkable) and then of his life (perfectly ordinary). 

He’s born a farm boy, of poor parents and a struggling piece of land, and he knows little of life outside of working the land. But when he’s twenty, his father sends him off to Agriculture college in hopes of him learning something that will help their crops do better. For a while, nothing happens — he works hard and feels out of place, but does well at school. 

But then he takes an English Lit class and everything changes. He struggles with it, but after a particularly rousing class with a popular professor, he falls in love with the written word and changes majors without telling anyone.

I loved this sequence — William Stoner going from a farm boy who does his duty as a son without questioning anything to him slowly becoming more tired of the work, almost angry that he cannot spend more time reading. And it gave me hope for the rest of the book.

But then, you know, the rest of the book happened. 

To begin with, it’s not badly written. Williams aims for this stateliness, a dignity of sorts in his prose, and it comes through well. But he also often gets lost in his own grandeur, and fumbles descriptions badly, using tired metaphors repeatedly, or overworking a sentence until it loses almost all meaning. At times, he’s sharp and precise, but at times it reads as if he didn’t know how to finish a sentence and then picked words at random. 

I know, I know — blasphemy, critiquing a classic for its prose. But look at it on a line level and see if you can make sense of it. Take this line, for example: 

“For two days Stoner did not meet his classes and did not speak to anyone he knew. He stayed in his small room, struggling with his decision. His books and the quiet of his room surrounded him; only rarely was he aware of the world outside his room, of the far murmur of shouting students…”

Do you see what I mean? It’s a rookie error that also serves no literary purpose (to repeat a word so many times), so you can’t claim it as intentional. It sounds bad when you read it out loud. My eight year old knows not to do this. 

Also “murmur of shouting” — I know what you mean, but it can also be said and described better. 

Every woman is “slender” (so many times has this word been used) and translucently white, with eyes either pale blue or kaleidoscopic violet (?), every face is “slim” unless it’s a fat person, in which case there’s always a sheen of sweat on their skin. 

And sure, you can ascribe some of this to the time in which the book was written, but it’s also plain bad writing, and that’s okay to say about any work of fiction, classic or not. 

But back to the story itself — it went sideways quickly, though I didn’t immediately get how much. I kept on merrily reading (and it is readable, I’ll give it that), until about half-way through when his wife (and we’ll discuss her later) takes their daughter, which she so far ignored, under her wing. She changes her, and the girl is clearly not taking it well, distancing herself from her father and seeming unhappier overall — and Stoner feels he can do nothing about this. Nothing! For his child! That is clearly suffering!

This made me contemplate the rest of the novel and see it in a new light. 

You see, Stoner does nothing. 

He makes exactly three decisions in his life. One, to take up literature instead of Agriculture. Two, not to go to war. And three, to pursue Edith doggedly until she agrees to marry him (though it’s clear she doesn’t want to). 

Other than that, he only stoically takes whatever life throws at him. He’s presented as this enduring, heroic figure to whom only bad things happen. People are out to get him, from his colleagues to his wife, and he, the righteous man that he is, the good and quiet man, does nothing to deserve it or to change it. 

Then you have to wonder about perspective and self-insert fiction. The book is written in third-person limited, but if you really think about it, it reads like a first-person perspective that only got shifted to give it more pathos. We see the world entirely through the lens of Stoner and the narrator (which is one and the same). When we close in on Edith in an attempt to understand her, even when she’s alone, we see her actions through the author’s/Stoner’s biased eye. 

Now, I don’t mean to presume I know anything about this man’s life (or care to learn), but it feels as if John Williams wrote this as a sort of vengeance to people who snubbed him. He pays no mind to how others might be experiencing the same situation, and only sees it from his angle. Oh, I did nothing wrong, nothing at all, and look at what they did to me!

Especially so in his married life. 

The way he tells it, it reminds me of those men who do a singular household chore and then act as if they did all the housework ever. One of the men in my orbit recently got divorced, and if you only listen to him, he doesn’t know why his wife divorced him and it’s all her fault anyway — he worked hard, took care of the kids, helped around the house, been a perfect husband, and she’s the hussy that left him. The funny part is that everyone knows he was barely ever home while his wife took care of everything and had a job, was basically a single mother of two for more than six years while he occasionally showed up to play the part of a concerned father.

But back to Stoner — he reads much like this guy. We only see his version of events. He’s a little angel, the best husband you could ask for, while his wife is the crazy bitch.

He meets Edith at a faculty gathering to celebrate the war ending, and he immediately falls for her based on one look and a conversation I’m not quite sure happened or if he filled in the details of it later when he learned more about Edith. Because in that first introduction, he tells us about how she plays the piano well but with no passion, paints well but with no passion, basically lives but with no passion — and how, pray tell, would he know that at this point? No, he imagines her to be a doll who never had a thought in her life, nor cared much about anything.

She’s entirely disinterested in him but because she’s a woman born in that era (and her aunt talks her into it) allows him to hang around. What possessed Stoner to pursue her is beyond me. Was it just because she was beautiful?

He proposes after two weeks of following her around, and she’s startled. All this woman wanted was to go to Europe with her aunt, and yet because of the pressures of that time and her parents, she married him. It’s so heartbreaking to read, because you can see her life being ripped away from her. She actually says, when he proposes, “What about my Europe trip?” and he laughs (!) as if it’s not important, as if the fact that he wants to marry her is more important than her dreams. He promises to take her there himself, but guess what happens?

Edith remains indifferent to the whole wedding and marriage thing at best, despondent at worst, until it’s finally done. I genuinely wonder what Stoner was thinking — that she’ll suddenly become a different person when they marry?

Of course not. 

This is the worst part right here, what should’ve been my red flag but wasn’t because I was willing to give this book the benefit of doubt due to the time it was written in. And I do so hate to transpose modern values and morals over older books — I avoid it as much as I can. But this novel doesn’t deserve that. 

Stoner rapes Edith. Repeatedly, for over a year before he gives up. He “performs his love”, and Edith, the villainess, is not responding well, she turns away from him, and then vomits (!) after he’s done. He says the whole thing is tragic for both of them — him, because she’s so dispassionate, and her, because well, she doesn’t like it. Edith “endures the violation”. 

He does it to her when she sleeps, and actually says he prefers it when she’s not awake (!) because she moans and babbles, and he can pretend it’s passion instead of her trying to get away (!). But no, the whole thing is so tragic for him because she doesn’t like his “love”, and he, the angel he is, tries to do it quickly. Oh, how great for her!

Then the poor woman is presented in various shades of useless, hysterical and evil — continually, throughout the novel. After her father dies and she has some time away from Stoner, she comes back changed. She’s taking up hobbies, making friends, trying to take more of an interest in him and his work, but you know what Stoner gets from this? He thinks that it’s all just to spite him.

So then she changes tracks and tries to be a better mother, to make friends with other moms and let her daughter have a more fun life, to take over more of the household duties so Stoner can work on his book and studies — and again, she’s the villain. She’s trying to take his daughter away from him, to ruin her! 

He’ll have you believe that Edith is for some inexplicable reason declaring a war on him (literally what he says). And look, I’m not saying you can glean any more meaning from all of this because all of the characters are just cardboard cutouts on which the writer can paint his grievances and fantasies (Stoner included), but come on! The husband from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper has more sense than Stoner does. 

I cannot believe he almost had me there for a moment!

The entire book is written impersonally, dispassionately, as if observing the events from behind a glass screen. You won’t feel connected to these characters, not even Stoner, who admittedly gets the most attention — but even he lacks interiority, motives, any kind of drive. Not even the biggest draw (for me) of this book comes to fruition. There’s maybe one great quote about loving books and escaping into them, and then nothing. You don’t get why he does anything that he does. Not even why he switches majors, unless you ascribe to him your own passion for reading and literature, because his is simply not described well. 

We’re told that Stoner loves literature, but for a man who does, he’s strangely disinterested in the world around him. He never ponders the human condition through the lens of the books he reads, never thinks about anything but himself much at all.

And I have to wonder, did anyone really read this? Or did the world just collectively trust New York Times Book Review and Tom Hanks (who’ll likely play Stoner in a movie adaptation some time in the future, mark my words) and then used the book as a prop to show off its own intelligence and good, obscure, taste? But it’s all pseudo-intellectual, sad lit boy, melancholy drivel. 

If that sounds harsh and you enjoyed this book, then I apologize. I do try to see in every work of fiction something that someone else would like. It’s very rare that I stumble onto one where I just don’t see it, and this is apparently the case here. The more I think about it, the less I like it, so I’ll stop here. I won’t discourage you from reading it, but I do invite you to think about whose perspective this book is written from (that it so casually dismisses women, Black people, disabled people, wars, human suffering, etc.), and think for yourself. Not every classic deserves to be one, and all of them are just books written a long time ago — they’re not beyond criticism, and certainly not above getting a one star which is what Stoner by John Williams will get from me.