Stoner
by John Williams
Summary
William Stoner arrives at the University of Missouri from his family's poor farm intending to study agriculture and instead falls, almost by accident, into English literature after a professor's class on Shakespeare's sonnets changes what he wants from his life. He stays on as an academic for the rest of his career, marries Edith, a woman from a sheltered, unhappy background, and watches the marriage settle into a cold, largely wordless standoff in which Edith eventually turns their daughter Grace against him. A late, brief affair with a younger instructor named Katherine Driscoll gives Stoner the only real happiness the novel shows him, until a departmental rival, Hollis Lomax, forces it to end by threatening exposure. Lomax's hostility, provoked years earlier when Stoner failed one of Lomax's favored graduate students for dishonest work, follows Stoner for the rest of his career, blocking his advancement long after the original dispute has been forgotten by everyone but the two men still fighting it. Diagnosed with terminal cancer near the end of his life, Stoner looks back over a marriage that failed, a career that stalled and a daughter he lost to alcoholism, and concludes, quietly and without self pity, that he was not a failure after all; he dies with his one published book, unread by almost anyone, slipping from his hands.
Williams writes in plain, exact prose that refuses melodrama even at Stoner's lowest points, and that restraint is the whole method: nothing in the book is exaggerated for effect, which is exactly why its accumulated disappointments land as hard as they do. It reads slowly and rewards patience, a quiet campus novel that asks a reader to find the drama in a life most people would call unremarkable.
Viking published Stoner in 1965, John Williams's third novel.
Historical Context & Significance
Stoner won no prize and found almost no readers in 1965; it sold fewer than two thousand copies and went out of print within a year, despite The New Yorker calling it a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man, and despite early admiration from the critics Irving Howe and C. P. Snow. Williams's own next novel, Augustus, would go on to win the National Book Award in 1973, a real prize that belongs entirely to that later book and has nothing to do with Stoner's own record.
The novel's rediscovery took decades and came almost entirely from readers rather than critics. A 2006 New York Review Books Classics edition found new attention, and when the French novelist Anna Gavalda translated it in 2011, European readers followed; the book went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies across twenty one countries and was named Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013, the retailer's own readers' choice honor rather than a literary jury's. A 2013 New Yorker essay called it the greatest American novel you've never heard of, and contemporary champions including Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan have kept that revival going, though critics like Elaine Showalter have also pushed back on the novel's sympathetic treatment of a man Showalter reads as making real, damaging choices rather than simply suffering them.