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Stoner

4.32 of 5 stars 4.32 · rating details · 3,722 ratings · 835 reviews

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known.

And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage...more

Paperback, 278 pages

Published June 20th 2006 by NYRB Classics (first published 1965)

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Jan 06, 2010 David rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: feces, misery-loves-company, much-ado-about-nothing, nyrb

I was going to start out this review of Stoner by feigning comic incredulity that the former conductor of the Boston Pops wrote a novel about potheads, but that is far, far too obvious and unsatisfying even for the likes of me. Instead, I am going to confess that I read only half of it (and, thereby, my ignorance has been properly disclaimed) but that this aborted reading filled me with such unmitigated contempt for the author that I plan on mounting every soapbox (if soapboxes haven't been tech...more I was going to start out this review of Stoner by feigning comic incredulity that the former conductor of the Boston Pops wrote a novel about potheads, but that is far, far too obvious and unsatisfying even for the likes of me. Instead, I am going to confess that I read only half of it (and, thereby, my ignorance has been properly disclaimed) but that this aborted reading filled me with such unmitigated contempt for the author that I plan on mounting every soapbox (if soapboxes haven't been technologically obviated by now) from here to the Great Barrier Reef condemning this plodding, tiresome, amateurish book with an antagonistic passion that literature hasn't evoked in me since Cambridge's A Concise History of France (wherein concision meant excising significant historical events in favor of agricultural data and a dimly Marxist perspective, but I digress -- as always).

I shouldn't blame John Williams for my rising blood pressure because in fact YOU are to blame. Yes, you. Perhaps not individually, but in the general sense of Goodreads voters and reviewers, of which you are presumably a constituent. As of this moment, Stoner has an average rating of 4.39 stars out of five on the basis of 531 Goodreader ratings. This is a remarkable score, to be sure, but as with many averages, it is complete and utter bullshit -- obviously contaminated by the spurious opinions of the ardent fans of graceless, tedious prose. You know who you are.

Let's parse the data, shall we? 459 people gave this turd four or five stars; whilst only eleven people were courageous enough to call a spade a spade and, against the grain of general opinion, to award it only one or two stars. I consider these eleven people heroes. You and your ilk can eulogize the armed forces, the pigs, the schlubby, mustachioed rescue workers, with your tearful montages of wars, standoffs, and celebrity house fires, all assembled to the reactionary tunes of 3 Doors Down or Nickelback; I prefer a subtler form of heroism -- you know, the lone voice who amid the Russophilic, ostentatiously intellectual acclaim for Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita dares to raise an eyebrow at this dry Goethe wannabe...

I therefore am a great hero because, fighting the insidious cabal of 'respectable' opinion, I offer my head to the rabble in order to warn you what a lifeless stinkbomb Stoner is. John Williams, I suspect, was an author who was better suited to actuarial work or fumigating. Something more prosaic. His main problem is that he wants desperately to tell you everything. He's adamant that you know this or that about his main character William Stoner's psychological make-up, habits, and proclivities, but unfortunately he'd rather put Mr. Stoner behind a glass wall at the zoo and recite a bunch of vague adjectives and banal activities relevant to him. In placing Stoner in the zoo and preparing a dry summation about him, he deprives Stoner of life, abbreviates him into a concept...

This is one of the worst kind of all writers, in my opinion. He's committed to telling us and not to showing us. He wants to control your attitude toward the characters by completely demystifying them. Williams lays everything on the table, as if he's handing you a psychological abstract. More than a few times, I wished that John Williams were not dead and were ready-at-hand, so I could give him a chocolate swirlie. And then I pulled back in my condemnation for a moment... I rethought my rage... There are literally jillions of shitty writers on this planet, and a not-insignificant number have had their works published. Why should I blame John Williams for having a dream -- a grand ambition? I wish for nothing less myself. The intended repository for my rage and general ill-will should be those who have applauded this crapfest -- the ones who've elevated it to the status of minor classic of 20th century American literature.

The straw which broke the etc. came midway through the book when Stoner's wife, until then a mousy, retiring, sickly sort, adopts a new attitude after the death of her father. She bobs her hair (it's the 1920s) and throws out her old clothes and buys some of those shapeless flapper-type shifts, and -- more consequentially -- she declares war on her husband. The psychology might as well be written in neon. She resents the dull (and not very affluent) academic life her husband provides. The switch is so abrupt and ridiculous that all of the author's explanations and expositions do nothing to make it palatable, even in his stubbornly distanced and abstract telling. I've read better character development when we got in small groups to discuss our first stories in Creative Writing 101.(less)

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Sep 23, 2012 knig rated it 4 of 5 stars

Bleak and monolithic, the eponymous Stoner rises from the tumult of a Boschean sea of humanity as a testament of Everyman: if Botticelli gave us the ‘Birth of Venus’ to accentuate the apex of human endeavour for beauty, love, aesthetics, truth and poetry, and Molierre, Machiavelli and Goethe gave us the quintessence of human failure, hypocrisy and deceit, then Williams, quietly, and unobtrusively, erects a pithy monument to the hopelessly forlorn, ‘small’, and non essential bios of the most mund...more Bleak and monolithic, the eponymous Stoner rises from the tumult of a Boschean sea of humanity as a testament of Everyman: if Botticelli gave us the ‘Birth of Venus’ to accentuate the apex of human endeavour for beauty, love, aesthetics, truth and poetry, and Molierre, Machiavelli and Goethe gave us the quintessence of human failure, hypocrisy and deceit, then Williams, quietly, and unobtrusively, erects a pithy monument to the hopelessly forlorn, ‘small’, and non essential bios of the most mundane, the man whose presence leaves no mark behind. Why is his name Stoner? Is it to designate the harsh, unbending and unerring changeless monotony of the barren farmland in Missouri he hails from? The land which yields nothing but takes its toll on each subsequent generation? Or is it Stoner to reveal the essence of the man?

Its hard to say if this novel is an affirmation or indictment of the lifestyle millions of us are ‘employed’ in: perhaps even without realising. With limited passion, ambition and general purpose, Stoner succumbs to a series of life disappointments which incrementally diminish his essence: like a frog in gradually increasing water temperature eventually boils without knowing it, so Stoner shrinks in Being until even his own body turns in on itself and finishes off the necrotising process. Lulled perhaps by the ‘trappings’ of a superficially acceptable raison d’etre: an assistant professorship at the university of Missouri in the early half of the last century, engaged with literature, through which he lives vicariously, Stoner ultimately experiences no serious impetus to throw away the ‘security blanket’ and ….’live’. Each opportunity to regroup and reform is wasted under the steady trickle of a monotonous endurance. At times I was gripping the pages with frustration, mentally urging him to take action: any action: Apply for a new job! Get a divorce! Run away with Katherine! Live, man, LIVE!

And then I had to accept the possibly harrowing realisation that Stoner, was, in essence, ‘living’. Even as he was dying, this was as much living as he was ever going to muster up. Do some of us need less ‘living’ then others, I wonder? An insight comes when he tells Katherine why he won’t ‘abscond’ with her: it isn’t fear of losing his daughter, or the scandal or the hurt or the lack of work and hardship that would go with it: it would be the fact that he would ‘become something else; other than himself. The destruction of what he does’.

And there we have it: a man defined, entrenched and practically replete with his marginality. The very little that defines him though seems to be enough to make it a life worth living, and the sacrifices worthwhile. Does this make him a pathetic loser in life, or a quiet winner?

Choose your own ending.
(less)

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Jul 27, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 5 of 5 stars

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, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by m...more

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Dec 08, 2010 Jimmy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb, male, novel, year-1960s, better-book-titles

UPDATE December 2010:

I just submitted this to Better Book Titles. I hope they accept it.

Original Review October 2009:
This is the most straight-forward linear narrative type of novel I've read in the past year. So at first, I was not impressed. But I soon realized that the novel is impressive precisely because it is able to be so damn linear, the writing style so damn plain, and the characters so damn dull and yet... and yet it manages to make me continue reading on, driven by what I don't know....more

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Jul 09, 2012 RandomAnthony rated it 5 of 5 stars

John Williams's Stoner blew me away. I've never read anything like it and some passages left me moved to the point of exhaustion. When I finished I put down the book (well, the Nook), picked it up again, and re-read highlighted pages. Stoner gave me strength; if you believe that the right books find you at the right time, as sometimes I believe, this book found me at the right time.

Stoner outlines the life of a farm kid who, at his dad's recommendation, attends college for agricultural studies b...more John Williams's Stoner blew me away. I've never read anything like it and some passages left me moved to the point of exhaustion. When I finished I put down the book (well, the Nook), picked it up again, and re-read highlighted pages. Stoner gave me strength; if you believe that the right books find you at the right time, as sometimes I believe, this book found me at the right time.

Stoner outlines the life of a farm kid who, at his dad's recommendation, attends college for agricultural studies but switches to literature and becomes a low-level university faculty member for most of his career. He marries an affluent city girl, starts teaching, and loves his daughter. His marriage begins to crumble and he starts an affair with a student. He runs afoul of university politics and lands an insulting teaching schedule. Williams manages, with breathtaking grace, to create complex, nuanced characters through lean, careful sentences. He'll pass years with a few heartbreaking paragraphs and allow the reader to generate what's between the lines. Stoner is like a Rothko painting put to words; empty blotches, perhaps, at first glance, but sublime, minimalist depth with time and attention. Characters change, but not all the way, then change back again, and, if a happy ending emerges, it's a still, sublime happiness.

I'm a teacher so I was, of course, overlaying my own background on the text while reading. But I think I would have appreciated Stoner anyway. The novel's power rises from its quiet, subtle movement. An excellent introduction (I don't think I've ever said that before...most introductions are stupid) in the NYRB edition includes a rate Williams interview in which the author describes the main character as heroic for, essentially, sticking to his own values and doing the best he can. What might appear as small failures are potentially victories in the context of Stoner's values (which, in other characters' eyes, sometimes appear as stubbornness). And even if you can't control every element of your environment, the politics at your job, how the people you love respond to challenges, and other variables across the multitudes of contexts, you can respond with grace and dignity. And when, nearing death, he experiences this:

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

I wanted to raise my fists in the air and recognize all of the invisible punk rock people living quietly, without affectation, holding as true as possible to their cores in the face of unrelenting messages that there is something wrong with them and they should feel other than they do and be other than what they are.

Stoner is amazing. You might not like it, I suppose, as some of my GR friends didn't. But even glancing through the text, searching out quotes, makes me feel more alive. For me, Stoner is one of those books. Thank you, Mr. Williams. You made my weekend. And beyond.

P.S. In some of the book's NYRB promotional materials Tom Hanks praises Stoner. I swear, Mr. Hanks, if you turn this novel into a movie, I will beat your ass. At least on the internet. I'm afraid you'll include scenes in which you're standing on a leaf-blown quad, deep in thought, staring into the sky, while treacly strings play in the background and the camera pans high and away. Don't fucking ruin this novel, Mr. Hanks. I'm warning you.(less)

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Aug 30, 2007 Maria Headley rated it 5 of 5 stars

Devastating novel of academia, unfulfilled hope, and a life not-entirely-lived. Gorgeous writing, heartbreaking plot, and if you're a fan, as I tend to be, of stories set in the dark halls of libraries and universities, this is one to read. The love story within this book is suddenly out-of-nowhere rapturous, and the marriage is brittle, delicate, insensible and perfectly done. The book feels so modern, though the bulk of the action is set in the 30's and 40's. I kept stopping to check that this...more

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Jul 12, 2010 David rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: mind-numbingly-boring, never-gonna-finish, wrist-slashingly-depressing, disappointing, read-in-2010

Reading "Stoner" gave me another one of those parallel universe experiences. In the goodreads universe, where everyone else lives, this is apparently a much loved and lauded book. Heck, those good folks at the New York Review of Books tell us it's a classic. And has this to say about the main protagonist:

William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforg...more Reading "Stoner" gave me another one of those parallel universe experiences. In the goodreads universe, where everyone else lives, this is apparently a much loved and lauded book. Heck, those good folks at the New York Review of Books tell us it's a classic. And has this to say about the main protagonist:

William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world

I'm sorry, but that's just a crock, even allowing for reviewer hyperbole. The very best that you could manage to say about Stoner is that he's a wraithlike nebbish who manages to glide through this dismal story without leaving an impression on anyone, least of all the reader. People seem to admire John Edward Williams's writing. The thing that baffled me is how any author can use so many words to write about a character and end up describing someone who is utterly devoid of a single distinguishing trait, or even a semblance of a personality.

Stoner is a stick figure who, over the course of the book, gets to interact with other stick figures (the resentful wife, the condescending academic colleagues, the college friend with a lust for life who gets mowed down before his prime in the Great War, etc etc ad bloody nauseam) as they act out standard plot #24*. Now I know the number of plots is finite, so it might seem unjust to fault an author for serving up the same story yet again. Fair enough. But it's considered good sport to mess with the template a little bit, to inject one's own authorial "spark", to add *something* to make the story rise above the generic template. Maybe you take the A.J. Cronin slant and stir in a little rage against the system. Or you might just add a big ladleful of chicken soup for the soul and give the story a Mr Chips vibe. What you can't do, and hope to keep the reader's interest and sympathy, is just trot out the bare-bones generic version of the tale, with no embellishment**. But this is exactly what Williams has done here. What's the point?

I wasn't looking for much. Hell, I'd have settled for the odd chunk of snappy dialog. A sense of humor. Anything at all, really. But even the most basic dialog seems to exceed Williams's capacity, and decent characterization eludes him completely.

Anyway, the bottom line is that, in my universe, this book was bleak, predictable, excruciatingly dull. Like one of those dreadful Thomas Hardy books where everyone is miserable all the time, but without the local color. One star, maximum. Though it isn't quite dreadful enough to earn a slot on the "intellectual con artist at work" shelf.

(Story #24: Intelligent {farmboy/kid from slums/juvenile delinquent/will be played by Matt Damon in the movie} transcends hardscrabble background to be first in the family to attend college. Lurches into an unfulfilling marriage that ends up making everyone miserable, teaches college, is left wondering if that's all there is. Alienation everywhere you look.)

**:Several authors have written intelligently within the framework of the "academic novel" (Francine Prose, Jane Smiley, James Hynes, Kingsley Amis, among others), even managing to be funny. But those are authors with, you know, discernible intelligence, an affliction which John Edward Williams has apparently been spared.

I just read David K's excellent review and realize that I am a hero, albeit a "Master and Margarita"-loving hero. So be it.

(less)

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Jun 18, 2012 Scot rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of my sisters shared an earlier review I wrote here with one of her friends at work, an avid reader, and my sister reported back that her friend said I really needed to read Stoner. In my ignorance, I had never heard of such a work of literature that I could recall, and initially suspected it might be a novel about a pothead in the 1970s. (To be clear: I would have no qualms about reading such a book, and indeed, could see great potential there, but I thought it a bit curious topic area for...more One of my sisters shared an earlier review I wrote here with one of her friends at work, an avid reader, and my sister reported back that her friend said I really needed to read Stoner. In my ignorance, I had never heard of such a work of literature that I could recall, and initially suspected it might be a novel about a pothead in the 1970s. (To be clear: I would have no qualms about reading such a book, and indeed, could see great potential there, but I thought it a bit curious topic area for my sister to recommend.)

Stoner was written in 1965 by John Williams, and since then has been passed along and promoted word of mouth by true lovers of literature who recognize a beautifully crisp and clear command of language and admire a writing style that might come off a bit stark and plain but quite sensitively and powerfully conveys the turbulence and angst (as well as the passion and the joy) simmering beneath the surface of a simple poor young man born to a dreary farm life in Missouri in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a young man who, once sent to the state university to pick up some farming expertise, has his entire life changed by an encounter with a classic Shakespearean sonnet in a sophomore lit survey class run by a veritable curmudgeon. This begins Stoner's lifelong commitment to the study and teaching of English at that very same state university.

Those is academe particularly will be amazed how well Williams conveys the irritating minutiae and tempests in teapots that are standard fare in the department politics and adminsitrative procedure of many a university department, whether it is at the time of World War I when our hero first becomes a grad student teaching assistant, in his decades stuck teaching Freshman comp at godforsaken hours because the department chair hates him, or for that matter, in the real world even now in the 21st century.

This is a book about academe but it is about much more. The hero is existential in that his nobility lies in the manner he endures and the true passion he finds in the pursuits of the mind, and somewhat later in his life, in the pursuits of the flesh. This literary overview of one man's life course might be seen by some as a sad story, but I see a beauty in Stoner's approach and resolution, in his ability to find the wherewithall to persevere in his sincere fascination with medieval rhetoric and the impact his dedicated tutelage can have upon his students. Don't expect Mr. Chips or To Sir With Love or Stand and Deliver: this is not a hagiographic tribute to a beloved prof. It is a rumination on the process of love, incorporating at different moments reflections on the complexity, pain, and pleasure in love of parents, children, spouses, paramours, students, nature, and perhaps yes, self. (less)

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Aug 24, 2009 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, favorites, lincoln-park-group, nyrb

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
William Shakespeare

John Williams's Stoner is that rare novel which is almost perfect in every way, from its plain prose style to its subtle portrayal of themes and evocative descriptions of events that are common enough for all adults to have experienced them - in ways that make the narration a pleasure - and w...more

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Jun 12, 2008 S. rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Ellen

Shelves: love-the-cover, favoritos, nyrb, read-in-2008, 5-stars, lonely-hearts

I didn't find this as sad or sorrowful as it’s often said to be. For me it’s about how the inner life redeems the outer, how a satisfying life of the mind makes the rest of life bearable. In that way, despite all the protagonist’s misfortune, I found Stoner an affirmative and even uplifting book.

May I add what an incredibly handsome paperback it is? The cover portrait by Thomas Eakins is gorgeous and perfect.

I should give it five stars. Tomorrow I will probably come back and do that.

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Sep 05, 2012 Angus rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: borrowed, reviewed-and-blogged, 5-stars

Original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

A Reconsideration

I sit down, gently lay my fingers on the home keys, and stare at the monitor for several minutes. I do not know how to start writing about this novel. Whatever comes out of this, it will never justify the praise that it deserves. I would never have heard of it had it not been mentioned, and pushed, to me by our bookish friend Aldrin. To say that one book is your favorite for the year is something, and to say that when the year is far from over i...more

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Sep 01, 2010 Suzanne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Suzanne by: Laura

I was somewhat sad when I finished this book, not only because the writing was good enough I did not want the experience of reading it to end, but also I felt almost as though I’d lost a friend. William Stoner had become very real to me.

The prose is exceptional, in a quiet, elegant way. This is the beautifully written story of a very ordinary man born just before the beginning of the 20th century who moves from a hard rural farming life to an academic career. We follow him through all the phase...more

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Jul 31, 2007 Bryant rated it 5 of 5 stars

John Williams (not the composer) wrote this in 1965, and it has floated gently over the waters of high criticism in the four decades since. I say gently because the book's gorgeously harnessed tone and style match its contained popularity. Few know of it, but those who know it love it.

This book is, in essence, a fictionalized study of solitude as experienced by the title character Stoner. How loneliness occurs, how it is to be understood, and how one can live passionately despite seeming isolat...more

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Jan 16, 2012 Al rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ah Stoner. So take a Thomas Wolfe novel and strip it down to some kind of mid-Western terseness and you will have "Stoner.
For months I have been griping and pleading with my friend Dave Neel about the boyishness (however bright0 of so many of the current novels I've read (Lethem et. al) and so I happily read "Stoner" and had none of the preoccupations with juvinilia (pot smoking, pop music) were present in this book.
The narrative charts the life of William Stoner and it moves fast as a rockles...more

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Jul 21, 2008 David S. rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: misfits, English majors

Shelves: recommended

This is one of those books that I (pardon the cliche) did not want to end. It also is one of those books that forces you look back over all the other books you've rated with 5 stars and consider dropping them a notch.

This is a book about a man named William Stoner. It covers his entrance to college at the University of Missouri and ends with his death. He originally goes in to study agriculture and farming but falls in love with literature. The book follows his time in academia, but it's certai...more This is one of those books that I (pardon the cliche) did not want to end. It also is one of those books that forces you look back over all the other books you've rated with 5 stars and consider dropping them a notch.

This is a book about a man named William Stoner. It covers his entrance to college at the University of Missouri and ends with his death. He originally goes in to study agriculture and farming but falls in love with literature. The book follows his time in academia, but it's certainly not about academia. It's one of those existential trips with a background in America and the school.

I had a hard time getting into the book at first, only because the prose is so solid, sober, and dispassionate. It can be a real challenge after reading a graphic novel or anything with fantastical elements. This is a realist book written by a realist author. Suddenly, this subtle poetry begins to emerge, or rather, I started to notice it. Every moment thereafter just whallops you upside the head, and not because the book is written with a heavy tone. It's just very real. The things that happen to Stoner and those around him are tragic to the hilt, but the ideas in them are successfully delivered only because the prose is so clear and deft, like an arrow making it's mark cleanly every time or a decidedly clean cut. And towards the end of the book, you start to see some humor that isn't so much jokey as it is observing the ridiculous nature of people and the world.

His aloneness becomes more and more stark as the novel progresses. It's a book about the highest aspirations of a human being that we touch on but ultimately is defeated by the world. It's also about people's resignation to life, people, and circumstances we can't control. However, if it's a book about how we suffer, it's just as much about how a man can overcome and endure through all of it as well. It's also about the ways we try to navigate the world, to try and live out an existence for ourselves that we can be happy with, and the ways the world encroaches on and denies that existence. It's about a lot of things...

A book that's devestatingly beautiful that I couldn't recommend more.
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Nov 15, 2008 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Thanks to the goodreaders (Matthew and Katie, particularly) who suggested this one. The ideal midpoint on the stylistic continuum. Blurbs talk of its "perfect novel"-ness, and somehow, amazingly, that's what I was thinking while reading: maybe the perfect traditional tone (attentive, steady, transparent prose that occasionally requires re-reading for savoring/remembering), a story perfectly paced, no gimmicks or catchy chapter titles or cleverness, and yet so deeply imagined and engaging thanks...more

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Jul 24, 2008 roberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt rated it 5 of 5 stars

fantastic book. steve almond suggested this. it reminds me very much of D.H.'s "Sons and Lovers" and the reason being is that the prose is superb--beautiful! It's a straight forward story about a student-turned professor. it has nothing to do with getting stoned. there's a heart-wrenching line in it that is as follows:

"He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even t...more

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Nov 13, 2011 Edan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: re-reads

My oh my what a beautiful book.

***

I just re-read this and it stood up to a second look. I'm stunned by how connected I feel to Stoner, and how his life--its heartbreaks, its moments of comfort and passion--affect me. I love how economical the storytelling is, and I was interested, this time around, by the out-of-body imagery: Stoner seeing himself from afar, or feeling himself speak without knowing he's doing it, and so on. A pretty fascinating look at how one comes to understand and accept one...more

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Mar 01, 2009 Shya rated it 4 of 5 stars

In some ways, it’s much easier to speak about what Stoner doesn’t do than what it does. It doesn’t have acrobatic language. It doesn’t have complex structure. It doesn’t have any real narrative drive or plot. It doesn’t have a particularly heroic or otherwise inherently interesting main character. So why do I like it? I keep thinking that Stoner is one of those rare books that, because it defies all prescriptive rules for good novel writing yet succeeds in being a good novel, holds the key to un...more In some ways, it’s much easier to speak about what Stoner doesn’t do than what it does. It doesn’t have acrobatic language. It doesn’t have complex structure. It doesn’t have any real narrative drive or plot. It doesn’t have a particularly heroic or otherwise inherently interesting main character. So why do I like it? I keep thinking that Stoner is one of those rare books that, because it defies all prescriptive rules for good novel writing yet succeeds in being a good novel, holds the key to understanding writing itself. Which of course means this tiny review, like others I’ve read of Stoner, will necessarily fail to explain why it’s so good.

Stoner takes roughly 275 pages to span the 66 year life of its protagonist, William Stoner, which, if you do the math, is a little more than 4 pages per year. This is a stupid thing to note, really, except that it highlights one of the positive rather than negative aspects of the book: that much of it is written in a kind of middle-ground overview, a glossy recap, and what isn’t written this way is necessarily episodic in nature. In some ways, it reads like the notes one might take were one to undergo a serious epic study of the man. Which one wouldn’t. So really, the form is perfectly suited to the subject.

But here again, trying to explain Stoner devolves into a kind of listing of the paradoxes of its ability to sustain the reader’s interest. The only real device I can see John Williams using to create a kind of tension, a drive, is that he explains, right in the opening passage, how little becomes of Stoner. That the man, essentially, amounts to nothing. What follows, then, is always seen relative to this predetermined outcome, and so what minor success he has in life is experienced through a film of sentimentality, and his failures are exaggerated, as though any person trespassing against him is guilty of some kind of underhanded, low blow. Of fighting dirty.

But Stoner is not always sympathetic. Or rather, he’s often sympathetic because of his flaws, rather than because of his attractive traits. In fact, his most heroic scene--involving “taking a stand” against a student he considers a poor performer, and the professor who champions the student’s cause--can just as easily be seen as a demonstration of Stoner’s short-sightedness, his inability to understand or tolerate what seems to be genius.

Ultimately, what you get with Stoner is a series of delicately drawn episodes, spanning the course of a rather uneventful life, each of which pays close attention to the nuances of its character’s emotional development. It’s told in a close-third person that plays along the line of Stoner’s self-awareness, exaggerating some thoughts and insights beyond what Stoner may himself be believed to possess, but rarely enough to really draw attention to the narrator, who remains roughly over Stoner’s shoulder. Indeed, the only misstep I’d accuse this book of making lies in the rare moments when the narration leaves Stoner and briefly follows one of the people close to him (mostly his wife). It doesn’t happen often enough, I don’t think, to make it feel like a coherent stylistic plan.

I’ve probably convinced just about everyone who reads this review to avoid Stoner. And really, that would probably be okay. It will no doubt be handed around among people who, despite their dumbstruck inability to explain or understand their appreciation of the book, appreciate it greatly nonetheless.
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Mar 29, 2009 Tyler Jones rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Stoner is a simple book, as many great books are.

The story is the life of William Stoner, the son of poor farm folk. Sent to university to study agriculture, Stoner discovers his calling as a teacher of English literature. Told in prose that is as plain, honest and powerful as the character it describes, the book shows how by following his dreams and staying true to his principles Stoner is made to suffer. Cut off from advancement in his university because of a personal clash with the department...more

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Oct 30, 2012 Gary rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-literature, kindle, own, nyrb

the story of William Stoner is one of the finest books I've ever read.
John Edward William's prose is so intelligent and graceful that reading Stoner was pure joy.
it is a melancholy tale, but not maudlin. William's strikes a perfect balance throughout the story.

critic Morris Dickstein says of Stoner,"something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away."

I would recommend Stoner to everyone.
I'm a little sad th...more

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Feb 04, 2011 Charles Kell rated it 5 of 5 stars

A very sad and beautiful book...a sad book for a sad day. There really is no category for "Stoner"; it's such an anomaly for its time--published in 1965--during the burgeoning height of American Postmodernism, and the masterful books of Pynchon and Barth. And this is the reason I think the book can easily be misread or glossed over. "Stoner" is a simple book, yet its breadth and scope, and ultimately, what the text is attempting to accomplish is just as far-ranging as anything in the postmodern...more

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Mar 11, 2009 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have a colleague who is convinced that the single biggest problem at the University of Oregon is grade inflation. No one, so far as I know, has listed John Williams' "Stoner" among the great novels of the twentieth century, so is my five-star rating just an indication that I too have become infected by the Duck disease my colleague decries? Maybe. But grading is always subjective. Moreover, another reader, Morris Dickstein, who writes reviews for "The New York Review of Books" (whose editors h...more I have a colleague who is convinced that the single biggest problem at the University of Oregon is grade inflation. No one, so far as I know, has listed John Williams' "Stoner" among the great novels of the twentieth century, so is my five-star rating just an indication that I too have become infected by the Duck disease my colleague decries? Maybe. But grading is always subjective. Moreover, another reader, Morris Dickstein, who writes reviews for "The New York Review of Books" (whose editors have never asked me to grace their pages, damn them to hell), has labeled "Stoner" a "perfect novel." I don't know if it deserves praise that high, but I will say it was perfect for me. William Stoner is a professor of English literature at the University of Missouri. He grew up as a farm boy and was sent to the university by his simple, hardworking parents to study agriculture. He takes an English literature class from an oddly inspiring professor and his life is transformed. Soon he is an English major, and by sheer discipline and diligence, he studies on until he receives a Ph.D. with a rather narrow specialty--the influence of the Latin tradition upon early English literature. As a scholar he is something of a mediocrity, but he is a devoted teacher, and he manages to survive a long career, although he is never promoted beyond the level of assistant professor, the lowest tenurable rank. Stoner is never entirely at home in the academy. America is a "land of opportunity" where children of common families, like Stoner, can aspire to and eventually enter the ivy covered temples of learning . . . but they are never entirely comfortable there. After all, it's hard to compete with those who sat around the breakfast table as small children discussing Homer with their parents while Bach's "Goldberg Variations" played on the phonograph in the next room. Sorry, I digress. Besides, there is no class in America! Anyway, the various moments in the academic life of William Stoner, described so well here, ring all too true. This is a great academic novel, perhaps the best I've read, but it is much more than just an academic novel. It is a marvelous study of people (my French wife would call them "Anglo-Saxon people") who keep emotions contained, until they burst out in disturbing and hurtful ways. It is also a story of terrible loneliness and of unexpected moments of love. And it has one of the best portrayals I've ever read of the fading of consciousness at the threshold of death. This professor dies well, his hand reaching out to his one published book, wherein some portion of his spirit will live on. Ah yes, the professorial grasp for immortality. Finally, John Williams writes some of the cleanest, clearest, most unpretentious English I've read in a long time. His more famous book, Augustus, won a National Book Award in 1973. I'll defintely read it, but just now I must find a two-star or three-star book so my overall average grade doesn't climb too high.(less)

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Jun 24, 2007 Dan Rivas marked it as to-read

Supposedly a very sobering novel. However, rumor is, if you light it on fire you will get high.

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Feb 19, 2009 Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this because someone told me about it, because it's set in Missouri, on the University of Missouri's campus, and because it's a nyrb classic, the irresistible imprint (is it the pretty colors, the fine fonts, or the nyrb stamp of approval?). A campus novel ; a boy from the country gets an education/discovers books/the life of the mind novel. It's a plot I generally can't get enough of, especially in this time period, during the wars, when coming from the country, I think, had a different...more I read this because someone told me about it, because it's set in Missouri, on the University of Missouri's campus, and because it's a nyrb classic, the irresistible imprint (is it the pretty colors, the fine fonts, or the nyrb stamp of approval?). A campus novel ; a boy from the country gets an education/discovers books/the life of the mind novel. It's a plot I generally can't get enough of, especially in this time period, during the wars, when coming from the country, I think, had a different meaning. And getting an education still had an air of true nobility about it, not one of privilege and guilt and overwrought identity. This book is also without any canny cute- or cleverness, the faux-precociousness so typical of contemporary campus/coming of age novels. But I shan't get started on the literary abuse of innocence, this completely unreal ironic cuteness weighing down recent attempts at this classic plot . . .

Stoner is a kind of tragedy, but it's also a book about love and teaching, a love of teaching, about what teaching is or might be, a beautiful hard thing, discovery. This book might be good for the suffering academic souls who can't figure out how to be proud of that suffering, that hard, relentless work; then again, it might not. But there might be hope in teaching, there is some, in this book.

Amazing quote:
"Five days before the marriage took place the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; and William Stoner watched the ceremony with a mixture of feeling that he had not had before. Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could only think of as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it. With a pity that was almost impersonal he watched the sad little ritual of the marriage and was oddly moved by the passive, indifferent beauty of his daughter's face and by the sullen desperation on the face of the young man."(less)

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Apr 02, 2008 Sarah Funke rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone with a pulse

A new favorite. Nothing to do with drugs, but all to do with William Stoner, a would-be American farmer turned mid-Western English professor. Good old-fashioned psychological portrait, dealing with all the messy stuff that makes life bearable, and unbearable, in the vein of Dreiser, or Sinclair Lewis.

Williams's insights are neither witty nor clever but are smart and true:

"he felt his love increased by its loss"

"an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put into words"

"As...more A new favorite. Nothing to do with drugs, but all to do with William Stoner, a would-be American farmer turned mid-Western English professor. Good old-fashioned psychological portrait, dealing with all the messy stuff that makes life bearable, and unbearable, in the vein of Dreiser, or Sinclair Lewis.

Williams's insights are neither witty nor clever but are smart and true:

"he felt his love increased by its loss"

"an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put into words"

"As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his book cases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture--as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible."

"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, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

***

I recently heard this put into the "academic panic" genre, to which books like Lucky Jim and maybe Pnin also belong. All have a university setting, and a title character who is or becomes an academic. I'd love to hear of others to add to this group.
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Aug 15, 2012 Proustitute rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-literature, nyrb, 2012, five-stars, favorites

It’s hard to adequately convey how powerful a novel Stoner is, perhaps because there is nothing unusual in Williams’s prose style, pacing, or the way he is using the bildungsroman conventions to focus on an erudite, bookish man’s familial, psychological, and collegiate conflicts.

I think that Williams is a master of flow: Stoner pulls you in, and you are immediately swept away—again, not because the prose or the narrative itself are particularly enthralling per se, but because Williams knows how...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Casper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel

Every now and then an all but forgotten classic is rediscovered. I imagine this idea of a forgotten classic attracts people for two reasons: it’s a classic, which means it has already proved its worth at some point in time and, being forgotten, it holds the underdog position, allowing us the opportunity to reclaim its well-deserved popularity. The most recent example is Stoner, by John Williams, originally published in 1965. A Dutch publisher issued a translation that has recently hit the bestse...more

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Aug 04, 2010 Iva rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: readers of literary fiction

First I must praise New York Review Books Classics. They contain great introductions and have well-chosen covers. They are the ones to keep or to hand to a friend. Now Stoner, written in 1965, has aged wonderfully. I thought of Dreiser and Hardy throughout as the characters were so reminiscent of theirs. This "academic" novel is beautifully written, compelling, heartbreaking and unforgetable. Colum McCann recently recommended Stoner as a novel that "spans 20th century tumult". It is a gem.

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Mar 12, 2010 Bob added it

late afternoon. Finished Stoner. Amazingly beautiful book. Looking for a stretch analogy (to tell students?) I thought---ok, let’s assume Fitzgerald and Hemingway managed to collaborate on writing one book and (strangely) they settled on the life of a favorite professor of literature who lived an ordinary life of ordinary failures and unrealized potential. One of those citizens of the Land of Failure with Promise whose name is Legion. Williams writes in a remarkable way that is precise, understa...more late afternoon. Finished Stoner. Amazingly beautiful book. Looking for a stretch analogy (to tell students?) I thought---ok, let’s assume Fitzgerald and Hemingway managed to collaborate on writing one book and (strangely) they settled on the life of a favorite professor of literature who lived an ordinary life of ordinary failures and unrealized potential. One of those citizens of the Land of Failure with Promise whose name is Legion. Williams writes in a remarkable way that is precise, understated, and both coldly perfect and utterly warm. At times the perfection of the book, of the telling and the insight, make you almost close it for good while you are squirming with the accuracy of the description and recognition. And yet through its quiet power, the book uses the work “love” about six or eight times throughout the story and this use conveys the true depth of love, the warmth and compassion, the driving passion of it that guarantees that however much Stoner sees himself as a failure, as most others see him, and even as we see him as well, the way love has shaped his life moves us to love him and the meaning of his life as he takes a long slow leave of it and by the end our sense of love has changed and embraced everything. Without ever mentioning religion at all this book is a deeply felt, deeply religious book in the sense that the heart of binding, the heart of faith being kept, the sacramental nature of the flesh and objects, of the real, is conveyed in the hush of utter seriousness with which Stoner’s stone-like life is told. And here too is the life of a professor, captured in its essentials, a professor of literature. Granted it is set in the 30s and early 4os. Both world wars take their toll on the story but at a distance in the deep background. The petty politics of university life get their due, the politics of the unhappy marriage, the deadening numbness of so much of what life delivers to so many. As so many reviewers have noted, the book is nearly miraculous in the way it transforms all of this into a reassurance greater pehaps than all that religion tries to offer. Last fall I read Julian Barnes’ book, Nothing to Fear. Barnes’ worries about his fear of death, talks at length about the death of his parents. My mother died a little over a year ago and so as I read Barnes I found a special resonance. And yet by the end his book was simply irritating, a showy performance by a writer in love with his own worriwortness, which he uses to write a pretty good memoir about his family but which also chews on the topic “fear of dying” and questions about the afterlife like a dog worn out by chewing an old rag toy. In contrast, John Williams tells the story of a life and of dying in a marvelous way that never asks what comes after death and reveals the value of this particular life as much greater than the liver of it can hope to see. Meaning then, the meaning, of Stoner’s life, is the joy that we share with the narrator, and while he is given what religious people used to call the blessing of a happy death, it is for us he dies and not for any doctrine or ritual or idea. His life has been a life of love unrealized, or not quite fully realized, but the love expands over us, much more than the thoroughgoing sadness of the unrealization. What an achievement of magic or art Williams created. Wiki reports that ”in a 2007 review of the recently reissued work, Morris Dickstein wrote that Stoner is "a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving that it takes your breath away."[1:] C.P Snow, writing in The Financial Times in 1973 asked "Why isn't this book famous?" Maybe because it is about a professor of literature and while everyone wants to love books, no one knows or wants to know about the small population of people who profess those books for a living because. . . . well, why? because it is a kind of job that is just a little embarassing for everyone involved. Writing literature or even decently good stories that can fill in for literature during slack times, is ok, better really, than “just” teaching. Stone says just before he retires that having been a teacher all his life he has no desire to write anything or to even want to write anything. Stoner also sees in his late career he has been regarded at various times as a devil, a fool and a hero. Whatever a teacher is is never quite certain, especially perhaps to the generations of students who have him. Williams is so spare in his art that there is little depiction of teaching or of students and yet the details chosen are as powerful as those used in any great haiku or sonnet. The novel comprehends teaching, the love that suffuses a life of teaching better than any work I know of. Another remarkable feature of the novel concerns the generation portrayed. Stoner was born in 1891 and so by 1930 he is close to forty years old, which at that time people considered as the beginning of becoming old, or, I guess, late middle age. Stoner dies shy of his 67th birthday, in 1958, the year I started high school. When I went to college and graduate school, I had professors who would have been taught by the Stoner generation. Williams was born in 1922, when Stoner would have been 31 and he wrote the novel (we assume) between roughly 1958 and ’63, when he, Williams, was no more than thirty-six or thirty-seven. He is re-imagining, creating, then, a figure who would be his father, his father’s generation. This is a remarkable feat, I think. Williams got his Ph.D. in literature in 1954 and a year later took over directorship of the creative writing program in Denver. He belonged, then, to the generation of veterans who flooded the university graduate programs after the war, bringing to them a vitality celebrated in the novel. But he was portraying the generation who taught him and you can’t help but assume that he has collaged a number of figures into the person and story of Professor Stoner and by doing so writing the epitaph of the whole field, the calling to “be a professor of literature” as it was conceived and practiced in America from the late 19th century until the second world war. After 1950 it all devolved. Creative writing programs rose in popularity, communication studies siphoned away Rhetoric, Linguistics took Grammar, the Social Sciences eventually dominated the Humanities. By 1967 when I was in graduate school at Chicago I had a professor who said darkly one day that the English department, English studies, would be over soon. I could not understand what he meant and little did I know then that three years earlier Williams had published a novel that explained it all, embodied it all, in the life story of Stoner. Williams keeps ideas out of the novel, I am tempted to say, “altogether.” Early on one character defines the three types of people who end up working in universities, the basis, for sure, of many jokes in the faculty commons and also quite true-to-life as characterizations of the strangeness of university life versus, it seems, business or the professions. But other than that, Stoner is a scholar of medieval poetry and he loves it in terms of art and history and there is no whiff of contemporary philosophy or, horrors, literary criticism or theory. Well, wait, there is a major conflict between the Shelleyean sublime and the Renaissance or Aristotelian view of poetry as art and craft. The visionary versus the artificer, that sort of thing. Stock in trade in English studies---before the French theorists came to our shores---around 1965. Before Deconstruction, before Lacanian Freudianism, before etc etc. But captured within the novel is the post-war sense of existential exhaustion, the scent of the absurd, the edge of the abyss, all these bumper sticker slogans that would come to the surface of American cultural life just months after Williams published the book. Williams prefers to talk about sadness. Here’s one passage to show what I mean, which makes a wonderful distinction:

He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt; given his own nature and the circumstance of his life with Edith, there was nothing that he could have done. And that knowledge intensified his sadness as no guilt could have, and made his love for his daughter more searching and more deep. (234)

I love that insight---”the easy luxury of guilt.” By the time his daughter reaches early adulthood, they are very distant but one night they have a visit and stay up talking. Stoner knows that she has become a drinker.

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. (248)

Lots behind that passage---from Fitzgerald and Hemingway through O’Neill and Faulkner and on to Beckett and Tennessee Williams. Other than Stoner, John Williams is known for Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus. I read the former a few years ago, actually twice over the last twenty years, I think. I’m sure now I’ll read Augustus soon. Williams won the National Book Award for that book in 1973.(less)

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About John Edward Williams

John Edward Williams was born on August 29, 1922, in Clarksville, Texas, near the Red River east of Paris, Texas and brought up in Texas. His grandparents were farmers; his stepfather was a janitor in a post office. After flunking out of junior college and holding various positions with newspapers and radio stations in the Southwest, Williams enlisted in the USAAF early in 1942, spending two and a...more John Edward Williams was born on August 29, 1922, in Clarksville, Texas, near the Red River east of Paris, Texas and brought up in Texas. His grandparents were farmers; his stepfather was a janitor in a post office. After flunking out of junior college and holding various positions with newspapers and radio stations in the Southwest, Williams enlisted in the USAAF early in 1942, spending two and a half years as a sergeant in India and Burma. Several years after the war, Williams enrolled in the University of Denver, where he received his B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1950. During this period, his first novel, Nothing But the Night, was published (1948), and his first volume of poems, The Broken Landscape, appeared the following year. In the fall of 1950, Williams went to the University of Missouri, where he taught and received a Ph.D. in 1954. In the fall of 1955, Williams took over the directorship of the creative writing program at the University of Denver, where he taught for more than 30 years. Williams's second novel, Butcher's Crossing, was published by Macmillan in 1960, followed by English Renaissance Poetry, an anthology published in 1963 by Doubleday which he edited and for which he wrote the introduction. His second book of poems, The Necessary Lie, appeared in 1965 and was published by Verb Publications. In 1965 he became editor of University of Denver Quarterly (later Denver Quarterly) until 1970. In 1965, Williams's third novel, Stoner, was published by Viking Press. It has been recently been re-issued by The New York Review of Books. His fourth novel, Augustus, was published by Viking Press in 1973 and won the prestigious National Book Award in 1973 and remains in print.

The critic Morris Dickstein has noted that, while Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus are "strikingly different in subject," they "show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility." Dickstein called Stoner, in particular, "something rarer than a great novel -- it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away."

After retiring from the University of Denver in 1986, Williams moved with his wife, Nancy, to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he resided until he died of respiratory failure on March 3, 1994. A fifth novel, The Sleep of Reason, was left unfinished at the time of his death.(less)

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Quotes from Stoner

“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.” — 42 people liked it

“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.” — 14 people liked it

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