Stoner

John Williams published Stoner in 1965 to almost complete indifference. The novel went out of print and stayed out of print for decades, known only to a small devoted readership, before being reissued in the 2000s and then becoming, unexpectedly, an international phenomenon-read widely in France, Germany, and the Netherlands before its American rediscovery. This belated recognition is partly the history of publishing, but it is also, inadvertently, the novel’s argument made manifest: that a life of unrecognized value is not therefore a failed life.

William Stoner is born on a Missouri farm at the end of the nineteenth century, enters the University of Missouri to study agriculture, encounters an English literature class, and is transformed-slowly, permanently-by the encounter with a poem. He becomes an English professor, marries unhappily, has a daughter he cannot reach, conducts a love affair that his circumstances force him to end, and dies at sixty-four without having achieved anything the world considers notable. Williams tells this story with a calm precision and a prose of remarkable plainness, and the effect is devastating.

The novel’s argument about academic life-about the beauty and the futility of the life of the mind within an institution-is conducted through narrative rather than polemic. Stoner’s antagonist, the memorably cold academic Lomax, is not a villain but a representative of the kind of petty institutional power that is everywhere and nowhere. The love affair with Katherine Driscoll is rendered with unusual delicacy.

What Williams achieves in Stoner is a portrait of a life as it actually feels from the inside-not the dramatic life of incident and achievement, but the continuous life of consciousness, sustained by love of a particular kind of beauty, enduring what must be endured.