In one of those few gratifying instances of belated artistic justice, John Williams’s “Stoner” has become an unexpected bestseller in Europe after being translated and championed by the French writer Anna Gavalda. Once every decade or so, someone like me tries to do the same service for it in the U.S., writing an essay arguing that “Stoner” is a great, chronically underappreciated American novel. (The latest of these, which also lists several previous such essays, is Morris Dickstein’s for the Times.) And yet it goes on being largely undiscovered in its own country, passed around and praised only among a bookish cognoscenti, and its author, John Williams, consigned to that unenviable category inhabited by such august company as Richard Yates and James Salter: the writer’s writer.
“Stoner” is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-“Gatsby.” I suspect one reason “Gatsby” is a classic is that, despite his delusions and his bad end, we all secretly think Gatsby’s pretty cool. Americans don’t really see him as an anti-hero or a tragic figure—not any more than they see the current breed of charismatic criminals on cable as villains. Gatsby’s a success story: he makes a ton of money, looks like a million bucks, owns a mansion, throws great parties, and even gets his dream girl, for a little while, at least. “Stoner” ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure. The book is set not in the city of dreams but back in the dusty heartland. It’s ostensibly an academic novel, a genre historically of interest exclusively to academics. Its values seem old-fashioned, prewar (which may be one reason it’s set a generation before it was written), holding up conscientious slogging as life’s greatest virtue and reward. And its prose, compared to Fitzgerald’s ecstatic art-nouveau lyricism, is austere, restrained, and precise; its polish is the less flashy, more enduring glow of burnished hardwood; its construction is invisibly flawless, like the kind of house they don’t know how to build anymore.
“Stoner” opens with a short prologue, describing, in terse, obit-like prose, the life and death of an unbeloved assistant professor of English at a provincial university. It mentions that the only evidence of his existence is a medieval manuscript donated to the library by his colleagues in his name. It concludes:
This is, no getting around it, a bummer. It’s also, in its unassuming way, an audacious beginning; by preëmpting the usual suspense of narrative, denying us even the promise of some cathartic tragedy, Williams forces us to wonder: What will this book be about? Its ambition is evident in the apparent humility of its subject: like Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, it’s to be nothing more or less than the story of a life. And there is something in even those first paragraphs, an un-show-off-y assurance in the prose, like the soft opening notes of a virtuoso or the first casual gestures of a master artist, that tells us we are in the presence not just of a great writer but of something more—someone who knows life, who maybe even understands it. It’s the same thing I sense in reading James Salter: the presence of wisdom. And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style.
Despite its pellucid prose, “Stoner” isn’t an easy book to read—not because it’s dense or abstruse but because it’s so painful. I had to stop reading it for a year or two, near the middle of the book, when Stoner’s wife, Edith, undertakes a deliberate but unselfconscious campaign to estrange him from his daughter, the one person he truly loves. Later on, after his daughter has been lost to him, Stoner finds real love again with a young student, his intellectual equal—and once again an enemy, seeing his happiness, sets out to take it from him. Williams contrives to forcibly deprive his hero of happiness in his marriage, his daughter, his lover, even his vocation. It all feels grindingly inevitable, like the annihilating whim of the gods in Euripides.
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. Two of them are even disfigured—one, Hollis Lomax, Stoner’s colleague and enemy, is a hunchback, and the other, Charles Walker, Lomax’s protégé, has a crippled arm and leg. This marking of evil with deformity strikes a twenty-first century reader as heavy-handed, not to mention un-p.c., like something out of fairy tales or “Dick Tracy.” But, unlike the villains of melodrama, these characters truly live. Stoner’s wife, Edith, isn’t a 2-D caricature; she’s been raised in an emotional vacuum, taught only useless ornamental skills, sheltered as wholly as possible from reality, and “her moral training … was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual”—effectively cultivated to become a brittle, conniving hysteric. Her cruelty is all the more hateful because she keeps herself unaware of it—she isn’t even a plain-dealing villain. And Lomax, Stoner’s great adversary in the arena of career, is a sensitive, wounded soul not unlike Stoner himself, who honestly believes it’s Stoner who’s blindly malign, bigoted against himself and his disabled favorite student.
The same revelation led Lomax and Stoner to their vocations: “the epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.” (This is, by the way, a trick the novel itself pulls off again and again, in quiet, transcendent moments that make the hair on your arms stand up for reasons you can’t name, giving you glimpses of eternity through the darkening view out an office window on a winter night.) At the end of a long evening of drinking at the Stoners’ house, spent talking mostly about Lomax’s early life and love of books, Lomax, in leaving, kisses Edith chastely on the lips—an oddly charged gesture that seems to have less to do with any attraction to his colleague’s wife than with their shared first love. It’s possible “Stoner” is doomed to be forever beloved mostly among critics, academics, and authors, because at its heart is the ineffable fetish that afflicts them all: “the love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.”
Lomax’s childhood discovery of literature is called “a kind of conversion,” and elsewhere the university is likened to a cloister, a refuge for those unfit for life in the world. But being unfit for the world is to no one’s discredit; the world outside the university is stupid and brutal; of it we hear only echoes of the World Wars and Depression. “Like the Church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God,” says Stoner’s friend Dave Masters, “we have our pretenses in order to survive.” In William Stoner’s most outwardly dramatic moment, when he refuses to pass the fraudulent Walker in his orals, he argues that it’s himself and his like who are the true cripples, confined to the safe asylum of the Academy; Walker is the world embodied, covering for his lack of even a basic factual command of his chosen field with florid rhetoric—in other words, he’s a bullshit artist. He’s a more instructive foil to Stoner than Lomax, not a rival but a kind of apostate. After writing his own book, Stoner “never thought of it, and of his authorship, without wonder and disbelief at his temerity and the responsibility he had assumed.” Literature is the true religion of “Stoner,” and it is this that ultimately redeems Stoner’s life.
The refrain of Stoner’s deathbed scene—“What did you expect?”—modulates in tone over the course of its pages from bitter disillusionment to resignation to transcendent serenity. At first, Stoner sees his own life as the world has judged it, with unforgiving clarity: “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.” But after what’s either a figment of delirium or a glimpse of grace—three laughing young couples trespassing across his lawn like ghosts, echoing the trio of friends with whom he went through school—he sees this estimation as “mean, unworthy of what his life had been.” In his last moments Stoner takes his own book—a musty treatise on the influence of Latin poetry on the Medieval lyric—from the bedside table, and as he touches its pages he feels “the old excitement that was like terror.”
The first time Stoner ever experienced this awe, as an undergraduate in an English Literature survey, moved to stillness by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “light slanted in the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from within them and go out against a dimness; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight.” As the faces of his classmates were transfigured, Stoner looked down at his own awkward farmer’s hands and saw them anew, as things strange and wonderful. Fumbling now for his own book on his deathbed, Stoner is once more struck by the miraculous working of his own fingers—both times Williams uses the word “marveled”— as if it is the Word that animates his flesh. And here again, at the end, “The sunlight, passing his window, shone upon the page, and he could not see what was written there.” For all the jewel-like beauty of its own prose, “Stoner” tells us that the words themselves are inessential; literature, like Stoner himself, is only an imperfect reflector of that light that comes from outside.
Part of “Stoner” ’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair. Stoner realizes at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them, not in some obscure scholarly Grail but in its pursuit. His life has not been squandered in mediocrity and obscurity; his undistinguished career has not been mulish labor but an act of devotion. He has been a priest of literature, and given himself as fully as he could to the thing he loved. The book’s conclusion, such as it is—I don’t know whether to call it a consolation or a warning—is that there is nothing better in this life. The line, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial,” is like the novel’s own epitaph. Its last image is of the book falling from lifeless fingers into silence.
“Revolutionary Road,” a novel similarly lauded and almost as little read, enjoyed a belated best-seller-dom with a tie-in edition coincident with Sam Mendes’s film adaptation. (Seeing all those commuters reading Yates’ pitiless novel was like watching people drink arsenic marketed as smart water.) It’s hard to imagine a movie ever being successfully made of “Stoner,” because it is so essentially about the dissonance between life as seen—shabby and ignominious, a joke or a waste—and life as experienced, shot through with shafts of love and meaning. “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,” says Stoner’s mentor, Archer Sloane, the man who first revealed to him the power of literature. The novel embodies the very virtues it exalts, the same virtues that probably relegate it, like its titular hero, to its perpetual place in the shade. But the book, like professor William Stoner, isn’t out to win popularity contests. It endures, illumined from within.
Tim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist. His most recent book is “We Learn Nothing.”
Photograph by Josef Koudelka/Magnum.
