Fiction From a Distance: "Stoner"
Thoughts on a book that made me clinically depressed
Stoner
WHY I READ THE BOOK
Recently I have this feeling that I’m a dumb person. It’s a nasty, invasive thought, and one of the ways I work to shove it off is reading books. And there’s some smart guys I follow on Twitter, and they were talking about this book called “Stoner.” I figured this would be the perfect book to read for me. Probably experimental, maybe autofiction about dealing weed or something.
After buying the book on Kindle, I realized this was not the case. “Stoner” is a mid-century classic by John E. Williams set in the first half of the 20th century, focused on the life of an unexceptional English professor who lived an unhappy life.
SYNOPSIS
As the 19th century wraps up, William Stoner is born into rural Mississippi poverty. His parents send him to college, having heard that an agriculture degree can help out on the farm. But as a freshman he becomes oddly entranced by English literature, and pursues a degree in that field instead. He never tells his parents, or the hardscrabble aunt and uncle he lives with while at college. Eventually he graduates, and pursues a graduate degree, and a professorial career.
Along the way, he becomes attracted to Edith, a woman of some means, and marries her. Edith turns out to be a miserable, damaged person incapable of love (or sex). His career isn’t a failure, but it’s far from a roaring success, and it doesn’t fix his horrible marriage. Eventually Stoner has a daughter, and he loves spending time with her. But as his relationship worsens with Edith, she begins to isolate Stoner from his daughter, and poisons their connection with her words.
As Stoner enters his middle-age years, two things happen: he has an affair with a grad student, and he develops an enemy at work. The affair is presented as life-affirming, a summer-long experience that provides the deepest connection he’s ever felt. But he isn’t able to keep it quiet, and it is used against him in a way that damages his career.
Stoner really loves his affair partner, but he chooses not to run away with her, as he is too intimidated by the difficulties presented. Eventually Stoner gets cancer, an aggressive form. Edith, still miserable, still damaged, dutifully does the bare minimum as he prepares to die. And then he dies.
“Stoner” is written in third-party omniscient narration, which gives us access to Stoner’s emotions. But Williams has no interest in presenting the immediate content of Stoner’s feelings. Instead we get stuff like this:
Instead of telling us that Stoner is lonely, Williams tells us that Stoner became aware of loneliness. The entire book is like this, and Stoner’s distance from his own life serves as a defense mechanism throughout the book. For example, below find the scene where Stoner is told that his father has died:
The key word here is “mechanically,” which serves as an easy shorthand for the tone of the scene. You might think that this trait of Stoner’s is specific to this moment - after all, many people recede within themselves when presented with tragedy. However, you’d be wrong - this is just how Stoner experiences basically everything. It is an essential element of his being, and even though it can serve as a defense mechanism, it is not always that. In other phases of his life, it actively keeps him from being happy.
This is most notable when it comes to his wife Edith’s purposeful severing of the once-strong connection between Stoner and his daughter, Grace. For the first seven or eight years of Grace’s life, Stoner is basically a single parent, a role that he treasures. But Edith eventually takes a toxic interest in her daughter, and body-shames her into severe weight loss, and poisons her relationship with her father.
As an engaged reader, these are infuriating passages to read. The year is 1926, or something. William Stoner is the man of the household and the sole provider for his wife and daughter. He is empowered by society standards to put his foot down, if he so wishes. There is nothing that Edith can actually do to keep him from his daughter. But like everything else in his life, Stoner watches his daughter grow away from him as if it’s happening to someone else, a thousand miles away:
THEMES / CONTEXT / CRITICSM
Wikipedia taught me that “Stoner” went unnoticed upon its publishing date in the 60s until it was rediscovered in the 90s (and the 2000s, and the 2010s) and championed by Bret Easton Ellis and other lit-world luminaries.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Easton Ellis was a big fan of the book. The man is, if nothing else, a master of emotionally-detached protagonists. Stoner is just a professor, not one of Easton Ellis’ cokehead actor-sociopaths or stylish serial killers. But there is a kinship there in the sense of deep remove from the events of their lives.
Tim Kreider, writing for The New Yorker, writes: “Part of ‘Stoner’’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair.”
While William Stoner himself does not despair about his life, that is purely because he is constitutionally incapable of feeling despair. It’s right there, in the first screencapped passage above - where others feel lonely, Stoner becomes aware of loneliness. The same goes for despair, and every other emotion that Stoner comes across.
Another, related case is made on the literary blog Death By Metaphor, where Satwik Mishra describes William Stoner as “characterized by his endurance, faith, and extraordinary grace.” Mishra goes on to argue that Stoner is a case study in stoicism, as despite his struggles he remains “incorruptible.”
Phrases like “extraordinary grace” and “incorruptible” suggest a man who is making conscious choices of non-reaction. But if you just take the book as it presents itself, if you take it for its word, Stoner is a man who knows no other way to live. When he is confronted by the college dean about the affair and what it means for his career, Stoner is hopeless:
Of course, Stoner doesn’t come up with any bright ideas after a week. As always, he remains tragically plagued by his inability to function in complex societal settings, doomed to inaction by his incessant confusion over the motivations and desires of others. Where others see stoicism, I see something closer to autism in William Stoner.
He has a painfully limited ability to interact with others, and only makes two friends during his entire life, one of whom dies in the first Great War. He relies heavily on the kindness of others, and finds himself at his wit’s end when others are not kind to him. He struggles to access his feelings, let alone communicate them, and he experiences life as a series of events that fail to jog him from stasis. To be clear, I mean nothing pejorative by this. It is simply what struck me as I read and reread the book.
Another word that might work better than stoicism is determinism - the idea that all events are driven by factors external to the personal will. Stoner, it seems, is set on a course for life over which he has no control. Even his decision to become a professor is not one that he makes himself. It comes from his freshman English professor:
This is part of what makes “Stoner” such a compelling, pseudo-biographical read. It emphasizes one of the deepest fears a human can feel: that their life has been set on a course from the moment they were born, and that all of their “choices” reduce to subconscious neurochemical impulses over which they have no control.
P.S. (RANDOM THOUGHTS):
John E. Williams himself seemed to think that Stoner lived a good life, and said: "I think he's a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life.”
I think that the above quote speaks more to Williams’ own conception of what a “very good life” means than the actual content of his novel, which predicts a deeply detached man who lives a pretty fucked-up life.
This book is very old-fashioned. Stoner’s wife is basically presented as a one-dimensional bitch, a horrible shrew incapable of showing love towards others. And Lomax, Stoner’s enemy at university, is physically disfigured, personifying the “evil cripple” stereotype that used to be common in fiction.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing in the book - almost too disturbing for me to write about - is Edith’s sexual dysfunction. Edith is repulsed by the idea of sex with Stoner, avoiding him during their honeymoon and only able to have intercourse with her husband when she is half-asleep at night. The concept of consent in this novel is ambiguous at best. And Edith has a weird, confusing connection to her father, of whom she appears to be terrified. When he dies, it triggers a manic breakdown, as she visits home and burns all of her childhood possessions. In these elements and a few other asides, Williams gives us a tiny window into a bizarre, complex woman’s mind. But he is largely uninterested in investigating Edith, as the novel retains a myopic focus on Stoner throughout.
The weaknesses of this book come in its lack of insight to other characters. But I think you can argue that this is a weakness of William Stoner himself, a man who understands no one - least of all himself.