Book Review: Stoner (1965)

by Sophie Tsai (Grade 10)

Against the backdrop of the Great Depression and two World Wars, Stoner  (1965) by John Williams recounts the story of a farmer’s son who goes on to become a literature professor. An English seminar transforms Stoner’s life. Yet unlike the typical Bildungsroman, which follows the major milestones of its characters, Stoner is about a man whose life remains ordinary and indistinguishable. 

Upon picking up the novel, I was quickly captivated by its lyrical, stream-of-consciousness writing. Right from the beginning, the author remarks on the kind of presence Stoner was to the rest of the world, 

“He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses…to the older ones his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger one it is merely a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

Although Williams paints Stoner as dull and uninteresting to those who know him, he invites the reader to discover more about him and the value his life carried. Regarding Stoner’s character, the author expresses his opinion in an interview, “I think he’s a real hero…He was a witness to values that are important.” 

Like Stoner, John Williams had a heart for literature, serving as Professor of English at the University of Denver for thirty years. During this time, he published two volumes of verse and edited a classic anthology on English Renaissance poetry. The parallel between the fictional character and the author’s life adds quite a layer of poignancy to the literary work.

Besides the theme of intellectual life, the novel also examines marriage in the early twentieth century. If Stoner is consumed by his own inner pursuits, his wife Edith grows up sheltered, protected, and, in a sense, prepared for marriage.

“She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.”

Edith soon marries Stoner out of propriety after he continuously insists upon seeing her. This leads her to turn bitter and resentful throughout their marriage. If the love for literature has been a ray of sunshine in Stoner’s otherwise unexceptional life, its radiance also engulfed him and blinded him from forming genuine connections. He endures a loveless marriage, refuses to fight for his own character, remains in a difficult career position he is unable to get out of, watches as his kid grows distant from him…the list goes on. Towards the end of the novel, Stoner reflects on how the public perceives him and how it differs from his internal reality and complexity. 

Despite all of this, Stoner is perhaps a story that resonates with all of us. In a modern age that defines success through tangible achievements, Stoner paints a deeply humane and realistic image of a single, haphazard life. In more recent years, the novel has seen a resurgence in readership, having the kind of audience it did not garner during the author’s lifetime, which is bittersweet. 

Stoner is a great work of fiction that defies traditional writing and plot conventions. The author Ian McEwan remarked that the novel was “a beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life.” Because he is deemed somewhat of a “loser” by the standards of American society, Stoner is a novel that subverts the American Dream, carrying lessons on forgiveness, regret, and contemplations on what truly constitutes a life well-lived.