Stoner by John Williams - DISCUSSION

[Ann D]

Karlus, I had an "Edith" in my life too, although she was not as malicious as the one in the book. I'm sure that affected my response to STONER.

Nicole, excellent point that Stoner encounters more than just a "difficult" life. I was particularly struck by this quote in the New Yorker review you linked to earlier:
"The book’s antagonists are its most problematic aspect; they’re essentially instruments used by the world to crush and smother anything that William Stoner loves." The reviewer does find them credible, but he is so right about their impact.

[[deleted user]]

Donna wrote: "I felt in the end he was content. He discovered and pursued his passion, had the experience of a deeply satisfying love, and chose the high road in his dealings with those who sought to bring him ..."

I agree, although his life could be seen as mundane, I think he lived by his values and was true to himself, especially in the way he handled those who were not respectful. In the end, he did matter.

[Karlus]

Stephanie C. wrote: "Donna wrote: "I felt in the end he was content. He discovered and pursued his passion, had the experience of a deeply satisfying love, and chose the high road in his dealings with those who sought..."

Hear, hear!

[Nicole]

I finally finished last night (I stayed up later than was probably wise, but it was worth it!). I see now what people are saying about Stoner's life taken as a whole: the terrible sadness does lift, first during his affair with Katherine Driscoll (though its end is horrible), and then with his stand against Lomax to resume teaching in his speciality. And he does seem to have a good death.

I found this passage particularly beautiful:

"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 teh heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, 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."

This was just a spectacularly beautiful book; the writing was like some kind of rich and delicious food, heavy and substantial, and yet easy to move through. I am so happy that I found this group, and that it has caused my to move Stoner up on my to-read list.

[Jane]

Ann wrote: "I think I would also have thrown the book out if there hadn't been that interlude with Katherine when Stoner was finally allowed some happiness. Wait, I also have a Kindle, so the most I could have..."

Ann, I am just rereading Stoner now. I loved this book the first time I read it, but was also infuriated by the character. When he lets Edith destroy his study, he essentially lets her destroy his sense of self.

"As he worked on the room and 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, liked a shamed secret, an image which was ostensibly of a place but was actually of himself. So it was himself he was trying to define as he worked on hisstudy." This study is pivotal. It is Stoner himself that Edith tries to destroy when she takes it from him.

I wanted to shake him, not only for letting her do that to him, but for what he lets her do to Grace. His helplessness made me glad he stood up to Lomax and refused to give that ninny the second chance. Unfortunately, I think he does this so he can stand up for "something" he believes strongly. He has a sense of what true learning is. Sloane helped him see the possibilities. He doesn't have a sense of what a loving family would be. His parents worked. Work was their lives. They didn't know what it mean to love a child. Love seemed to be an extra they didn't have time or capacity for given the need to survive.

[Linda]

Jane wrote: "Ann wrote: "I think I would also have thrown the book out if there hadn't been that interlude with Katherine when Stoner was finally allowed some happiness. Wait, I also have a Kindle, so the most ..."

I agree and appreciate your comments, particularly that Stoner didn't have a model for a loving family and, therefore, didn't know how to stand up for that.

[Donna]

Linda wrote: "Jane wrote: "Ann wrote: "I think I would also have thrown the book out if there hadn't been that interlude with Katherine when Stoner was finally allowed some happiness. Wait, I also have a Kindle,..."

And it would seem that Edith lacked the same model.

[Cateline]

Really excellent points. Neither of them had any sort of example of loving. He, only the example of sacrifice and hard work, and she.....goodness alone knows what her parents were like behind closed doors. I actually shudder to think.

[Jane]

☯Emily has reviews on Booklikes wrote: "I agree that the writing is beautiful and Williams portrayed the pettiness of the university with accuracy. Unfortunately, Stoner was so passive that he became an unsympathetic character. I could..."

Emily, you may not see this, the conversation is so long past, but I am reading it again for another face to face book club and I am having a completely different experience. I too was utterly frustrated with Stoner. He shouldn't have let Edith destroy Grace. After all, for years, he was her only parent. And then, I realize that he didn't have any ability to stand up to her. It would have made him, in his own estimation, a bully. He knew it was a battle, and that Edith was twisting the battle so that she seemed innocent. I think of battles I've had in my own marriage to (I believed) cling to my integrity or the rightness of my position. Stoner simply doesn't think in those terms. I read a review that described how frustrated Americans are with this book, but that Europeans get the existential (? I think that's the word) position that Williams is taking. We are far less accepting, ready to change our fate, to lash out against it. I certainly felt that way, fiercely, on first reading.

I also had the same question about Sloan's grief and tears over the war. It wasn't completely explained. So many things aren't. But Stoner feels the same way as World War II begins. I think it's a grief at the loss of so many of the young men he is teaching. An entire generation either killed or at risk of being killed. Master's death echoes throughout the book.

[Jane]

Carol wrote: "Why do you think Williams chose sonnet 73 as the turning point in Stoner's life?"
Carol, I didn't mark the sonnet the first time I read the book, but this time, I marked at as the pivotal theme in the book. Absolutely, it describes a life, Stoner's in particular.

[Jane]

Susan from MD wrote: "I just finished the book last night and really enjoyed it. Just a couple comments for now.

The movement of his possessions to the back porch was significant to me because I realized the he would ..."

Susan, this scene was incredibly upsetting to me. He had described realizing that he was creating himself as he built the shelves for this study. Edith was essentially destroying that self. It felt like such a true thing. Even in loving marriages, the partners push against each other, attempting to change those parts of their partners that are hard to live with. Edith, crazy as she is, does that in spades.

[Jane]

Barbara wrote: "Great discussion, everyone. This book moved me so much on a personal level. My father grew up in exactly the same kind of farm life that Stoner had. He was the first in his family to graduate fr..."

Barbara, this captures perfectly what I felt on this second reading of Stoner. It was not small thing that Stoner discovered his life's passion. He fell in love with literature. What it was capable of doing-transforming one's experience of life. I have to believe that Stoner realized that the grief his life contained was reflected in literature, and not just in literature, but in grammar. One of my favorite passages is the one where he and Katherine are essentially saying goodbye.

But finally they had to talk, he knew; though the words they said were like a performance of something they had rehearsed again and again in the privacies of their knowledge. They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect—“We have been happy, haven’t we?”—to the past—“We were happy—happier than anyone, I think”—and at last came to the necessity of discourse. The grief of the end, and the fact that if they run off together they will no longer be who they are…teachers, scholars, people who make their living, their lives that way.

[Sue]

Jane, that is a great selection--the parting of Stoner and Katherine. Someday I will read this again too.

[Barbara]

Jane, thanks for coming back to this topic to write those notes. You took me back to the book again. I think in that parting scene Stoner and Katherine acknowledged that they had something that many other people never get even if it was for a short time.

I also continue to love the scenes of Stoner's intellectual awakening in the beginning. Williams does such a good job of contrasting the bleakness of his mental "food" on the farm with what he finds at the university.

[Barbara]

Also, it's interesting that Europeans were thought to understand this book more than Americans at the time it was published. The book is more like European films than American ones, particularly at that point.

[Ann D]

Very interesting comments, Jane. I am one of those readers who remain deeply frustrated by Stoner's passivity in the face of Edith's destructive behavior towards not only him, but also their daughter.

It is true that his parents only supplied him with a model of passive acceptance, but somehow he was able to make a strong stand for academic integrity when his principles were involved. I wonder why that was not possible in his personal life. Perhaps Edith, like many manipulative people, had convinced him that he was somehow at fault. And I doubt that he could foresee what a disaster her influence would be on the daughter.

I very much liked that passage describing the parting of Katherine and Stoner. Thanks for highlighting it.

[Kat]

Every once in awhile I have such a different reaction to a novel than others that it gives me pause. This was one of those. Some of things written in the March discussion did resonate for me. I saw Stoner as a deeply damaged, deeply passive man with little capacity for intimate relationships. (Of course, Edith was even more damaged and wounded.) Literature was the only area where he could get beyond his passivity. He rightly views his life (at the end) as a series of failures in the personal realm. However, he's able to celebrate it because he has been himself. "A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been." I think the ending of the book is the best part, very moving and valuable. I think it needs to be looked at in the light of the earlier passage about how Roman lyrical poets viewed the nothingness of death.

I believe that this novel is what Northrup Frye would call a "romance." (He also called Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights romances.)In a romance, characters are more representative than individualized. It's the opposite (in Frye's nomenclature) of a realist novel.

This must be true, because as a realist novel--in my view--it fails utterly. Stoner's parents have no likes or dislikes, nothing that annoys them or makes them smile, no personalities at all. No matter how worn down they are by the land, they simply can't be viewed as real people. Though Stoner is virtually a single father raising Grace for some time, there is none of the stress or even the labor involved in that. She is a perfect little angel who sits playing quietly while he works. Certainly there are children who do that sometimes, but never all the time! In a realist novel, we would want to know what happened to Walker after Lomax got him admitted. But in a romance, he has served his role and need not appear again. I think this relates to the European view mentioned above--in that view Stoner is indeed an Everyman, as mentioned above, and it's the value of an ordinary and undistinguished life that's being examined through the amazing, beautifully written conclusion.

Unfortunately, I am a huge fan of the realist novel and these things bothered me horribly from page one. I wouldn't have finished this novel if not for my face-to-face book group and certainly didn't enjoy reading it. However, I'm glad I did hang in there, because that ending was worth it all.

[Ann D]

That's a very insightful note, Kat. Thanks for posting it. I was one of those who was really bothered by the ending, but you present a good case for the opposite point of you. I guess maybe he just came to accept himself, recognized his limitations, and was glad that he had managed to achieve as much as he did.

Classifying this book as a "romance" is also helpful in understanding it.

[Kat]

Thanks, Ann. I'm not sure it's that he valued what he'd been able to achieve, but that he came to see achievement as beside the point: It was his life and he lived it. Maybe it's an "existential" case for valuing existence itself.

As I was reviewing my highlighting I saw the moment when Lomax and Edith kissed, at the party, which was a head-scratcher for me. Do you think it was a loose end, something the author meant to develop but changed his mind about? Or does it have some thematic or plot significance I'm missing? There's a lot of unstated meaning in this novel, I think.

[Ann D]

Kat,
I'm sure I'm just projecting my own temperament onto Stoner, but if I were dying and facing up to so many betrayals and undeserved disappointments, no way would I end up feeling good about my life. Do not go gentle into that good night - etc.

But then, I have never been a passive person, so it's good for me to explore that type in literature.

As for Lomax and Edith, I wondered where that was going too. Stoner was good to them,but they both quite viciously betrayed him - one in his personal life and the other in his career. Maybe the kiss just prefigured that dual importance in his life.

[Kat]

Thanks for continuing the conversation with me, Ann, so long after the original discussion! My face-to-face group discussed it last night. I asked about the kiss, but no one had any ideas. One reader said he felt the character of Edith never really cohered. Everyone liked the book a lot, though--except me! But I did come to appreciate its merits.

[Ann D]

This is an excellent book for discussion in any case, Kat. I know my face to face group wouldn't go for it at all.

[Mary Anne]

Kat, I love that you have refreshed our discussion! My in person book group will be discussing Stoner next month, and you've added another POV that I can present to that group.

[Portia]

A group I was with discussed this book in 2013. I was the only member who didn't warm up to Stoner the person, and my opinion wasn't popular. I agree with Kat and add that I thought the book was almost a mere listing of events in a life. The odd thing is that the book really held my interest and I read it very quickly.