Over winter break, a high school friend recommended I read Stoner by John Williams. I had never heard of it, and upon looking it up I found out that it was not merely a great novel—it is, in some circles, considered perfect, “so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away.” What, then, makes this book so remarkable?
William Stoner is a decidedly unremarkable man. That’s not just my judgement, but that of the people around him. Williams writes, on Stoner’s first page, that a student who hears his name “seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question.” His colleagues “speak of him rarely.”
The only distinguishing thing about William Stoner is that he loses things. Marriage. Family. Love. Students. Everything that Stoner gets, he seems to lose without recourse. He loses swiftly, he loses painfully; most importantly, he loses needlessly and often, unfairly. His wife pulls his daughter away from him. His colleague holds a grudge against him for refusing to pass an incompetent student. His late-in-life affair with Katherine falls apart.
The novel, a biography of Stoner, inevitably ends with his death. His story should be sad, depressing, nihilistic. It’s about a man who was only fleetingly happy and never really successful. Yet Williams believes otherwise. In an interview with Bryan Wooley in Williams’ Denver Quarterly, he describes Stoner as “a real hero” who had a “very good life.”
Really, John? You gave Stoner a callous wife, a distant daughter, dead parents, dickhead colleagues, and a doomed affair. How is this a “very good life”? How the hell is he a “real hero”?
Stoner’s misfortune feels fated—initially. But the more time you spend with him, the less obvious his faultlessness seems. He chooses to marry Edith despite their lack of connection. He doesn’t resist her hostile takeover of their daughter’s life. He doesn’t adequately respond to the unfair and exaggerated charges his colleagues accused him of.
Bad things happen to Stoner, but at no point does he really choose to do anything meaningful to stop them. Williams’ gorgeous, understated third-person narration hides his internal monologue, rendering him seemingly incapable of interpreting and responding to his emotions. The reader adopts his sense of helplessness, watching as the anger and sadness he should feel never manifests into anything beyond malaise. The line between circumstance and responsibility is hard to discern.
What isn’t hard to discern is Stoner’s ability to endure. His behavior is “as he might have gone through a driving and nearly unendurable storm, his head down, his jaw locked, his mind fixed upon the next step and the next and next.” Rather than attack the causes, Stoner always chooses to accept the effects. He is unable to figure out the reasons behind his circumstances, and thus he abandons their examination entirely. Instead, he clings onto the North Star of his academic devotion, allowing him to press on, to push forward, and to endure.
Stoner’s complexity comes from the blurred responsibility of Stoner’s circumstances. William Stoner becomes a hero from his ability to endure them. Time and time and time again, the novel knocks you off your feet with lines of quiet brilliance, lines that take you out of the repetitive melancholy and save you, even just briefly. Some shit happens to us; some shit we cause. The beauty of Stoner is its attempt to reason out what’s our fault and what isn’t—a question impossibly entangled with our interior lives and external situations. The heroics of William Stoner comes from realizing that question might not even be worth asking.
Enduringly,
Charlie Phelan
Image: Julius von Leypold, Wanderer in the Storm, oil on canvas, 1835 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).