Book review: Stoner, John Williams (1965)

It seems somehow ironic to say, but this seems to me to be the best American novel of the 20th century bar none. How it remained a secret for so long is the big question the critics will have to ask themselves, but it’s definitely time for a revisit. It stands up there with Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’, Charles Dickens’ ‘Bleak House,’ and Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’ as one of the great Romantic novels. It might sound odd to lump this book together with such ancient precedents, but there you go. For the rest of this review, caution is required because I will be revealing details of the book that would spoil the reading for people who haven’t read the book and want to. People who don’t want to know what happens in the book should stop reading here.

The story concerns the life of an academic in Missouri whose parents were farmers. Young William intends to study agricultural science but once he discovers the beauties of literature due to the teaching of a man named Archer Sloane – it is a particularly circuitous sonnet of Shakespeare that does the trick – he never looks back and goes on to secure two postgraduate degrees before taking up teaching at the university, where he gains tenure. Meanwhile, he marries a woman named Edith Bostwick who turns out to be a psychopath, and who, in the course of the novel, will do everything in her power to torment her gentle husband. There are intimations that Edith’s behaviour might be predicated on her relationship to her father, who suicides after the stock market crash of 1929, but this point is not clarified by the author before the book ends.

At the university, Stoner is offered the position of head of the English department by his old friend Gordon Finch, who is the faculty dean, but he declines the role. Instead it is given to a man from outside the town named Hollis Lomax who had arrived at the university with a strong reputation. He also has a hunch back, and this disfigurement will come to define the reader’s understanding of Lomax because of a contretemps that he has with Stoner.

The episode starts when one of Lomax’s students, a man with a partially-paralysed leg, named Charles Walker, arrives at Stoner’s office one day and asks if he can join a tutorial Stoner runs for sophomore students. Stoner is unwilling to admit him at first because the class is already full but ultimately allows it, but Walker turns out to be completely unable to fit in with the class. He makes irrelevant points in response to things that Stoner says and puts on airs that merely display to a disinterested observer that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is a devotee of the Romantic poets and at the expense of real scholarship he adopts their uncritical enthusiasm for Shakespeare along with the Romantic ideal of the tortured genius.

The problem gets worse when Stoner is invited to help to assess Walker’s competence in a viva voce exam that Lomax and some other academics are involved in. Stoner shreds any credibility Walker might have had by asking him some simple questions that a first-year student should have been easily able to answer, and fails him. The verdict of the judges must be unanimous so Stoner’s rejection turns out to result in Walker failing his course of study. Once Lomax becomes head of the department he immediately takes measures to punish Stoner, who he thinks has discriminated against Walker because of his disability, instead of on account of his learning.

Back at home, Stoner and his wife live largely separate lives and Edith tries to distance Stoner from their daughter, Grace. Stoner begins an affair with a young woman (he is in his early 40s by this time) and for the first time in his life experiences sexual intimacy. But Lomax, who employs the young woman, whose name is Katherine Driscoll, finds out about the liaisons and threatens to fire her. Finch calls Stoner to his office and informs him of the situation and in the end Katherine leaves town of her own accord. Stoner goes back to teaching the first-year students Lomax has saddled him with and in the end contracts cancer before his retirement comes due. He dies when his grandson is entering junior high school. Grace by this time is drinking too much.

This bare sketch of a plot doesn’t by any means do justice to the poetry that resides within the book. We talk about a writer having a strong or weak poetic vision, and in this case the author’s ability to communicate ideas and feelings through his prose evidences a high degree of refinement. Like Gogol or Dickens, Williams uses descriptions of the environments that animate the places in which the characters work out their dramas to talk about the world he wants to create, and to comment on it in ways that will contributed to the reader’s experience of the characters and ideas that are contained in the narrative. These moments of poetic signification are scattered throughout the book and add a vibrancy and lustre to the conception of the whole, enabling Williams to talk about the America of the 20s and 30s and 40s that he remembers from his own experience of it, even though the story itself is entirely a fiction.

When you are reading the book the pathos embodied in the character of Stoner is powerful, and while Edith and Lomax are far worse than the average person based on the level of evil they perpetrate on their unfortunate victim, the circumstances of the drama are not so foreign to everyday experience. Many people will have had a bad experience with a spouse or partner and even more will have had bad experiences at work. The home and the workplace are, of course, two of the most productive loci of novelistic endeavour we have. For this reason, what happens to Stoner is, shall we say, emblematic of something sinister that is woven into the very fabric of modern society.

While reading the book I tried hard to understand the meaning of its title and I think that I finally made sense of it. Obviously the book is named after its main character, but a book published in the mid-60s with this title must raise eyebrows, especially because of the drug culture that was emerging in society as the generation born at the end of the war emerged into adulthood. In my mind, the title makes sense if you turn the plot on its head and instead of Edith tormenting her husband, her husband is imagined doing something similar to her. This kind of flipping of the bias in order to critique masculine domination, which was and is far more prevalent than the kind of abuse Edith is guilty of in her relations with her husband, lets you create in your mind an obverse image of the whole, and it is one that fits in with the kinds of innovations in social relations that were appearing in America and in other countries around the world in the era when the book appeared in print. Some might take exception with this interpretation, but I found it to have a neat relevance when I considered the social ambience in which the book was published.

The other point I wanted to make is that the kind of identity politics that encourages Lomax to take revenge on Stoner is something that, these days, seems unremarkable. Privileging a colleague so that they gain professional preference simply because of the position they occupy on the political continuum might have seemed unusual in Williams’ day, but it is easy to contemplate this occurring today, in our more polarised era, where identity politics determines so much about our public personas. The term “identity politics” might have seemed a novelty for Williams’ first readers, and would not have been understood by the previous generation of adults (such as Lomax and Stoner) but nowadays it is key to understanding the way people behave. Williams was right to pay attention to it in his novel, to show how even those on the left can behave in unedifying ways given the right circumstances.

The only weak point in the book is its ending. Williams tries to conjure up the experience of dying in the last two or three pages of the book. We see Stoner’s world contracting to his room in his house and the clutter on the bedside table as sounds come through the window near him in the hours and minutes before he finally and for the last time loses consciousness. Now, I have seen both of my parents die. With dad, mum and I were called to the nursing home he was living in at three o’clock one morning in April 2011 and he was pretty much unconscious during the time we were in the room with him before he finally drew his last breath. Before he died he never knew we were there in the room. With mum, I had seen her in the hospital in the afternoon of the day she died (which took place at some point during the evening) in July 2016, before she was taken back to her nursing home in a patient transport vehicle. While I did not see her at the time she died, what is certain is that in the afternoon she was only partially conscious of her surroundings. She was talking sometimes but what she said didn’t make much sense. She was not really aware of where she was or of her physical state, let alone her own state of mind.

In her spy thriller ‘Transcription’ that was published in 2018, UK author Kate Atkinson tries to do something like what Williams attempts in his novel: convey the lived reality of a person who is dying. She doesn’t spend as much energy on the task as Williams does and while I thought that she was closer to the mark there are still things awry in her version. What I have seen of people who are near death is an absence of conscious thought of the kind that Williams shows Stoner still capable of in his story. If anything, the person who is close to death might experience some sort of reverie that might be filled like dreams with confusing images and feelings. But there is simply no way of knowing one way or the other. When a person is sick with an infection and unable to speak, or even to open their eyes or turn their head, and is completely reliant on people around them, it is difficult to see how the kinds of thoughts that Williams ascribes to Stoner in the final pages of the book could have existed.