#287:  STONER.   John Williams’s novel Stoner, is about a man who, born on a farm in Missouri, discovers at college not only a love of literature but a vocation to teach. The book moves with an utterly sure-handed, unrushed solidity; it has a tragic sense that recalls the great Russian novelists, with their ability in a paragraph to strip a character down to the bone.  Movies about teachers have buried us in so much candied floss on the subject that this sobriety of observation is almost shocking: we were expecting cheerful uplift and Stoner is roiling and painful: a look under the lid.  Stoner’s commitment to this new-discovered world both dislocates and delivers him; younger readers, born into the new abundance of information and goods that came with the internet, may need to make an imaginative leap to understand what the escape from the cultural drylands of farming life means to Williams’s protagonist.  It’s the constant, the sustaining force, in his life, which is otherwise a shambles: a desperately unhappy marriage, being an outsider to the world he lives in, stymied in his career by an enemy, a frustrated affair, all borne with stoicism and something only a shade off of mulish stubbornness.  He succeeds, but is largely forgotten after his death.  No soaring violins, no cheerleaders.

       Williams said in an interview of Stoner, “I think he’s a real hero.”  He might have done better to keep mum about that, because nowadays many people’s notion of a hero is that of the superheroes who fly around in movies.  They defeat all odds, they break the rules and get away with it: they’re winners, in some appalling Disneyesque way.  In contrast, Williams makes clear that much of the disaster in Stoner’s life—the pain he causes other people—is a terrible inarticulacy.  Many of the shocks he gives people—his news to his parents that he will not return to take on the family farm—land like bombs because he has done so little to prepare them.  He’s a slow learner: it takes him ten years before he reaches his real skills as a teacher, his ability to convey his enthusiasm and knowledge.  This hampers him in his career, though late in the book he does an ingenious bit of table-turning on the dean who’s been sabotaging him.  Largely he is hemmed in by the immovable narrowness of the world he lives in.  This enrages some of the younger readers who have posted criticisms of the book online, and who I suspect have little sense of the brick solidity of the time’s conventions that Stoner is facing.

       It’s in the female characters that Stoner faces some of the most reasonable criticism online. One of the most purely horrific things in the book—as harrowing to read as any suspense novel—is the chapter in which Stoner meets Edith, his future wife, falls in love and travels to meet his fiancee’s family in New Orleans.  Reading it, your stomach clenches—Williams besets Stoner with all the whistles of an oncoming train wreck, which we can hear but he can’t. The viewpoint in the book, published in 1965, is exclusively masculine; reading it, I found myself wondering how women readers would react to it.  Some of this is in the novel’s time period, set between the two world wars. (This was nicely chosen, as Stoner’s facing the second world war is a poignant echo of the effect of World War I on his mentor, Archer Stone.)  Given the time, it may be merely realistic that it is the women who get the short end of the emotional stick: not just Stoner’s wife Edith and their daughter Grace (who does engineer a kind of escape) but his late romance, Katherine Driscoll.  Edith is a disaster in the role given to her, the academic wife, and she’s a ghastly, curdling presence—a blight.  But I could well imagine her provoking a counter-story, à la Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and I could imagine it being well worth reading.  There’s enough to Edith as a character to make us suspect she has her own tale to tell.

      I hope no one makes a hanging case of this, as Stoner uniquely conveys that teaching may be long, hard, discouraging work, requiring not just effort but genuine courage, hemmed about with all sorts of hostility and convention, and takes place amidst the genuine tragedies of everyday life. In the interview quoted before, Williams spoke of  “the particular kind of identity” the job of teaching gives Stoner, and said, “You’ve got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization.”  As much as any novel I know, Stoner gives the job, the faith, and the tradition their tragic and joyful due.

--Stoner was not wildly successful on first publication; it’s been a book that’s survived by being passed from reader’s hands to hands.  It’s been republished now by New York Review Books, whose batting average of finding good books to reprint is pretty remarkable.  Three bows.