★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This is no suspense yarn. The whole plot is spelled out clinically in the first paragraph. William Stoner is born in rural Missouri to hardworking farmers, works a dreadful job to make his way through college, then abandons his farming roots to follow his dream of becoming a professor of literature. He has an unremarkable career in academia, then dies, making no lasting impression on his colleagues or students.
It seems like a bleak story, but here it’s the journey that matters.
By the first third of the book, Stoner has it all: a fulfilling tenured professorship teaching exactly what he loves, a beautiful wife, an elegant home with a study surrounded by his books and papers. Stoner finds himself and gets a glimpse of true happiness.
As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study.
But we knew it could not last. A series of unfortunate events, most stemming from a poor marriage, derails Stoner’s life. The downward spiral reminds me of the saddest of country songs.
I’m sometimes asked why I read so much literary fiction, why I don’t stick to subjects like history and biography and science. Part of it is the sheer joy of the story, but many times, a novel provides incredible insights about what it means to live a good life, insights that you can apply again and again, especially when reality interrupts your hopes and dreams. Biographies tell how a notable figure in history succeeded. Great novels teach us lessons about the darker side of life, when things don’t work out, when bad things, often unrecoverable things, happen to good people.
This, for me, was exactly that kind of novel. If you’ve ever fancied a life in academia, thinking it’s all hushed libraries and engaged students, read this book. If you’ve ever wondered how important choosing the right partner in life is, read this book. If you’ve ever felt like quitting your job because of an asshole boss or co-worker, read this book!
He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him.
Yet what makes this novel great is Stoner’s response to each hardship. A lesser man would have lashed out, gone on a three-week bender, given up. But not Stoner. After each setback, he rises to his feet, dusts himself off, and carries on stoically, philosophically. Diminished and horribly unhappy, yes, but true to himself and his values. A lesser writer would have let Stoner wallow in despair, bemoaning his fate, telling us all about it. But instead the story moves forward with crisp, spare, objective writing, which somehow transmutes the misery to the reader as aftershocks in the turbulence of Stoner’s wake.
In Stoner, Williams squashes the myth that following your passion leads to happiness. But maybe that’s not the point, or even possible. Instead, we find someone who sticks to his principles, possesses an unwavering sense of commitment and duty, and never loses respect for the nobility of unending hard work. These are the things, not merely passion, that make a life worth living.
Highlights
His mother was facing him, but she did not see him. Her eyes were squeezed shut; she was breathing heavily, her face twisted as if in pain, and her closed fists were pressed against her cheeks. With wonder Stoner realized that she was crying, deeply and silently, with the shame and awkwardness of one who seldom weeps.
In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.
his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.