Stoner

By: John Williams

Narrated by: Robin Field

William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th 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, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. 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.

©1965 John Williams (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“A perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away." (Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review )

“A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” ( New Yorker)

“An exquisite study, bleak as Hopper, of a hopelessly honest academic at a meretricious Midwestern university. I had not known…that the kind of unsparing portrait of failed marriage shown in Stoner existed before John Cheever.” ( Los Angeles Times)

A guidebook for life for people like me

Very good fiction can be better than non-fiction at explaining your place in the universe and this book does just that by considering the life and times of just one character, William Stoner. There's not much to his story but for those of us who have had a fairly mediocre life (and who embrace that mediocrity) Stoner's story helps us understand ourselves just a little bit better. It's good to see that university politics never change over time. The stakes are so small making the professors ever more vicious.

As for the narrator, he made the events come alive and at times I felt as if I were alive in the early part of the last century while being transfixed by the story and the storyteller.

"What did you expect?" (in American academia)

Picture a typical epic fantasy story wherein a plucky hero with unique powers leaves his hometown to fight against the forces of evil to save the world. John Williams' historical novel Stoner (1965), about a thoughtful, diligent, and intelligent (but not brilliant) academic everyman who never travels, learns to drive, or becomes a full professor, would appear to be the opposite kind of story. According to the first paragraphs of the novel, William Stoner entered the University of Missouri at age 19 in 1910, earned his PhD and became an instructor there during WWI, and died in 1956 as an assistant professor mostly forgotten by students and colleagues. Why would anyone want to read a novel filling in the details of such a life!?

Such is John Williams' skill, empathy, and imagination, however, that from the moment Stoner has an epiphany in his sophomore survey of English literature class when his ironic professor Archer Sloane momentarily loses himself in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and then asks him what the poem is saying to him over a span of three hundred years, and he can only raise his hands and utter an abortive, "It means," and so unwittingly falls in love with literature, we care for Stoner, so much so that reading his attempt to live for his love against overwhelming odds, including an inimical department chair, a nightmarish graduate student, a self-centered, unloving, and neurotic wife, and, of course, his own surface equanimity, diffidence, and indifference, becomes a page-turning and at times unbearably suspenseful adventure. Indeed, as Professor Sloane tells Stoner when he's trying to decide whether or not to go fight in World War I, "There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history," and Stoner's adult life and career are, finally, as heroic as that of any martial epic fantasy hero.

Williams excels at concisely writing historical backgrounds and human relationships, so that though the novel is less than three-hundred pages, it convincingly conveys everything from Stoner's special field (the Latin tradition and Medieval and Renaissance literature), a tense PhD oral preliminary examination (that brought back my own nightmarish memories), and his fraught relationship with his wife (the best Stoner can believe is that they've become "like old friends or exhausted enemies") to the cultural climate of big events like World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. (This is a quietly anti-war novel: "he saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war [in Korea], marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare.")

Williams also writes vivid descriptions, of, for example, people:
"It was the face of a matinee idol. Long and thin and mobile, it was nevertheless strongly featured; his forehead was high and narrow, with heavy veins, and his thick waving hair, the color of ripe wheat, swept back from it in a somewhat theatrical pompadour. He dropped his cigarette on the floor, ground it beneath his sole, and spoke.
'I am Lomax.' He paused; his voice, rich and deep, articulated his words precisely, with a dramatic resonance. 'I hope I have not disrupted your meeting.'"

And wastelands:
"He lay on the bed and looked out the single window until the dawn came, until there were no shadows upon the land, until it stretched gray and barren and infinite before him."

And southern evenings:
"The dogwoods . . . were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze. The sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air."

Throughout, with irony and affection Williams expresses the hermetic yet vulnerable world of American academia, which, as Stoner's brilliant young graduate student friend puts it early on, is no ivory tower but an asylum or rest home for the infirm, for people who could never succeed in the real world outside.

Robin Field, does a fine reading of the audiobook, though perhaps the quality of his voice is too good at expressing sensitive fatigue.

Williams' novel, then, is anything but bleak and boring. His depiction of Stoner's evolution from an ignorant young man from a sterile farm with spindly chickens, boney cows, and prematurely aged parents into a university literature instructor unable to express in classes or papers what he most profoundly knew and finally into a middle-aged "teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man," able to communicate his love of literature, in which "the blackest and coldest print" could express the mystery of the mind and heart, is a quiet triumph. For all he has been saying with passion of mind and flesh throughout his career is, "Look! I am alive."

No Hollywood Ending

Any additional comments?

Robin Field's tone was perfect for the style of prose. Loved the writing. Story was strangely riveting. Thoroughly enjoyed.

good

Sorry,we couldn't find that page but help is help Sorry, we couldn't find that page but help is help.

Even a Mediocre Life can be Well Lived

If you could sum up Stoner in three words, what would they be?

Expectations and choices life

Which character – as performed by Robin Field – was your favorite?

Stoner

Any additional comments?

This is so close to real life. How so much of our life is controlled by the choices and desires of others. Every happy thing was taken from Stoner because of hatred of him by others.