“With the Shame and Awkwardness of One Who Seldom Weeps”: Stoner by John Williams
Stoner is not a book I would’ve selected from the bookstore. It was offered to me by my friend and fellow book lover, Laura, who devours novels faster than anyone I know. She’s French, but her mom is American and a retired English teacher. Laura told me that one of the only times she feels most in touch with her true inner self is when she’s reading in English.
Stoner, the eponymous character of Williams’s novel, has a similar realization during his sophomore year in college at the University of Missouri. He’s sitting in class, when an old professor cold-calls him: “Mr. Stoner, what do you think?” Stoner, in his early twenties, is stunned into paralysis. He’s old for his grade because he started college late, after growing up on a rural farm with his poor, uneducated parents. So Stoner is new to the world of academia, for sure, and he’s also new to having his opinion asked of him. It’s unclear from the text whether it was this open-ended question that cracked open something profound and roiling in young Stoner, or if it was simply his general awe with literature itself. But suddenly, he is foregoing his father’s preferred agriculture curriculum in favor of English literature seminars and surveys of Latin and Greek. As a quiet, awkward stranger in a strange land, Stoner, like Laura, feels most in touch with his true inner self when he is reading English literature.
As a quiet, awkward stranger in a strange land, Stoner feels most in touch with his true inner self when he is reading English literature.
Stoner breaks the news of his decision to become an academic to his stoic, hardened farmer parents during their attendance at his commencement ceremony. It’s one of the memorable scenes of the book, even though it’s early on, because of the fine line Williams walks between realism and romanticism. He clearly respects the hard labor of the agricultural working class, in the tradition of Millet, or even Migrant Mother: we get descriptions of their knuckles, their skin, their facial expressions — and none of it is grotesque, but rather cut out of clay, meant to be admired. Stoner announces to his parents that he will not return to the farm; Williams writes that Stoner’s father receives the news “as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist.” Stoner’s mother is “breathing heavily, her face twisted as if in pain, and her closed fists were pressed against her cheeks.” And then this: “With wonder Stoner realized she was crying, deeply and silently, with the shame and awkwardness of one who seldom weeps.”
Descriptions like these come to define Williams’s novel. They have the effect of generating sympathy, but not for anyone in particular. Sympathy, then, accompanies us through the vicissitudes of the 20th century as we follow awkward Mr. Stoner (“Willy,” as his vindictive and perpetually child-like wife, Edith, calls him) through his long career at the University of Missouri, first as an instructor in English and then as an assistant professor.
It is with sympathy that we must hold all of the cruelties of Stoner’s life, some accidental, others seemingly avoidable. But that’s the way realistic fiction works: it convinces you that the inexorable way of things for this character could probably have been avoided if any other person were in his shoes. Because it is this guy, with his particular flaws, it has to go this way. He can’t leave his abusive and mentally ill wife; he can’t get totalizing revenge against his cruel bully of a department chair; he can’t make this smarmy manipulator of a student disappear. We, like Stoner, must endure, must press on in spite of these “repeated blows of a fist.”
Certainly Stoner himself gets the bulk of our sympathy, and that’s why we cringe with rage when one after another bullying, ambitious figure takes advantage of his gentle integrity. That doesn’t mean he’s the most interesting character in the book — on the contrary. Writers of fan fiction might have a field day with the story of Grace, Stoner’s only daughter, who is buffeted and harangued by her miserable mother. However, we don’t read desperately to the bitter end of this novel because anyone is particularly interesting. Instead, we read on because we know that so many lives are lived like William Stoner’s: silently, with an eerie intrepidness.
Some live for power — and this novel shows us what they are willing to do to get it. Others, like Stoner, live knowing they are small, and that knowledge allows them to find a measure of goodness.
