Stoner by John Williams: "Glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay"

I first saw John Williams's novel Stoner (1965) when it was given its own little table in my local Waterstones. Having worked there, albeit briefly, I know that Waterstones doesn't crack out the parlour-sized furniture for any old thing (the new Thomas Pynchon at Gower Street was the last one I remembered), so it caught my eye. I think the accompanying sign said something along the lines of "The book everyone's talking about," which, if true, had escaped me; but the equally hyperbolic jacket quote from the New York Times, "This is a perfect novel", convinced me that if I could claim any interest in contemporary trends in fiction, I should pay attention.

It turned out that the book had been excavated from near-obscurity by Vintage on the recommendation of John McGahern (Julian Barnes gives a helpfully detailed explanation of this for the Guardian), and been catapulted, in the slightly puzzling way that these things happen, into an international bestseller. Only the understated Vintage aesthetic could convince me that it wouldn't be another Fifty Shades.

Before I read it, I bought it as a present for my granny, who is an impressively wide reader. She, alas, didn't like it. Neither did my aunt. Neither did my cousin's boyfriend. Most other people I asked hadn't even heard of it. Suddenly it had become a rather flawed novel that somewhat less than everyone was talking about. So, over a deliciously rainy and relaxing bank holiday weekend in Cornwall, I got down to business and read it.

Luckily, I loved it. It's a short-ish novel (under 300 pages), and follows William Stoner as he transforms, in a stuttering kind of way, from an uneducated only child set to inherit his parents' farm, via a sudden epiphany (through Shakespeare's Sonnet 73) to a literature major, doctoral student, and finally a tenured professor at the University of Missouri. He specialises in the reception of the classics in medieval literature, which, combined with his refusal to join up to fight in World War II, sets him up as a man content to bury himself in as deep a niche as he needs to, for a quiet life.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

But he certainly doesn't deserve the fallout of his greatest mistake: to marry someone he barely knows and never manages to, Edith Bostwick, who becomes the antagonist for around half the book. It is infuriatingly ambiguous whether she's genuinely waging war against him (that's what it feels like) or simply trying to compensate for her own lack of fulfilment. She slashes at the intimacy he has with his daughter Grace, and erodes the space in which he can work, forcing him to spend most of his time at the faculty. It's not clear what she gains from this, if anything -- certainly not a better relationship with her daughter or husband. The two are perfectly balanced: William's personality is neat and simple and affectionate and unextraordinary; Edith's is complicated and incoherent, an almost complete mystery.

The University of Missouri, around which Stoner is based

Photo: University of Missouri

Everything that follows from his domestic alienation -- including a gorgeous, predictably doomed love affair, and a vicious conflict in the University department -- adds weight after weight onto the emotional cartload that William pulls with him through his life. The novel, I think, is about how a simple failure to be honest about one's feelings can lead, not just to one disaster, but to catastrophe after catastrophe, until the spirit is broken. As the other jacket quotes foretold, this novel broke my heart, quietly, often without anger. And its slightly greying, weary-feeling, straightforward narrative style -- as if Williams might have comforted himself by saying, "Come on, John, just work through the story, explain it clearly, then you can take a rest" -- only makes it more heart-wrenching. 

I did, thankfully, discover a friend who had read the novel and enjoyed it. He and I read English together as undergrads, and had a short but agreeable discussion about its brilliance (though we conceded that, as English graduates, we're pretty much the perfect audience for a book about a literature professor). We also touched on the way that certain types of American literature make you feel, as my friend put it, "as if even putting words on the page is an act of sadness". I've never felt this so acutely as I did with Stoner. 

John Williams is quoted as having said, "To read without joy is stupid." And Stoner is, despite its trajectory of tragedy, full of great joy -- not only in the rare moments of happiness that William himself finds (doomed, of course), but also the joy I experienced as a reader in being led to feel such sympathy with any human being, even a fictional one. In Harvest (which, to my mind, deserved a Booker win more than Eleanor Catton), Jim Crace writes of a fiddle melody, "His tune is both glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay"; and so is Stoner both devastating and reassuring, all at once. It's not a perfect novel (steady on, New York Times), but it's lovely nevertheless.