Stoner by John Williams: A Summary of the Quiet Novel That Found Its Readers Fifty Years Late
What Stoner is about
John Williams published Stoner on 23 April 1965 with Viking Press. Almost nobody noticed. The book slipped out of view and stayed there for decades, until a republication in the 2000s turned it into one of the most admired rediscoveries in modern American fiction. Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Bret Easton Ellis and John McGahern have all championed it.
The story is simple enough to summarise in a sentence. William Stoner is born on a small Missouri farm in 1891. His father suggests he go to the University of Missouri to study agriculture. He goes. In Archer Sloane's English course he meets Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, and something in him turns over. He abandons agriculture for the humanities without telling his parents, takes an MA in English, and begins to teach.
That is the whole shape of his life. He stays at the university. He marries. He has a daughter. He has an affair. He teaches, badly at first and then well, under a department head who spends years quietly punishing him. He grows old and deaf and becomes a legend in his own corridor. The novel is usually filed as an academic or campus novel, and it earns that label, but the campus is less a comic setting than a small sealed world in which an ordinary man's entire existence plays out.
Williams wrote a book about a life that, by any external measure, does not amount to much. The power of it comes from how seriously he takes that life anyway.
The main characters
William Stoner is the still centre. He is passive by temperament, slow to assert himself, and capable of a stubbornness that surfaces only when something he believes in is at stake. He accepts a great deal of unhappiness without complaint. He also refuses, at the one moment it matters professionally, to pass a student he knows to be dishonest.
Edith, his wife, is one of the most unsettling figures in the book. Stoner meets her at a faculty party and is instantly infatuated. She cancels a trip to Europe so they can marry. Hostility develops almost immediately. She is repulsed by sex, then announces after three years that she wants a baby and becomes briefly, fiercely passionate. After their daughter is born she stays bedridden for nearly a year. Later she conducts what Stoner slowly understands to be a deliberate campaign to separate him from the child.
Grace, the daughter, spends her early years in her father's study and is close to him. She becomes a secretive child who smiles and laughs easily and is hollow underneath.
Hollis Lomax is the colleague who becomes head of the department. When Stoner fails his protégé Charles Walker, Lomax begins a campaign of revenge that lasts the rest of Stoner's career, starting with grinding, pointless teaching schedules.
Katherine Driscoll is a younger instructor. A professional collaboration becomes a love affair, and the affair is the happiest thing that happens to Stoner. Gordon Finch and Dave Masters are his graduate school friends. Both enlist when the First World War begins. Stoner stays, after a conversation with Sloane. Masters is killed in France. Finch comes back an officer and eventually becomes acting dean.
The themes
Vocation is the engine of the book. Stoner's love of literature arrives like a conversion and never leaves him. It survives a miserable marriage, a vindictive boss and a lost love. When he and Katherine end the affair, they do so partly because fighting for it would wreck the academic work they both regard as a calling. That is a bleak piece of arithmetic, and Williams lets it stand.
Identity runs alongside it. A farm boy becomes a scholar and is never quite either thing afterwards. He cannot tell his parents what he has done.
Then there is marriage and family as a long siege. Williams is unsparing about what two mismatched people can do to each other over forty years, and about what a child absorbs from the wreckage. And there is moral conduct without reward. Stoner does the right thing over Charles Walker and pays for it for decades. Nobody thanks him.
How it ends (spoilers)
Grace marries the father of her child, who enlists and dies in the Pacific before the baby is born. She moves to St Louis and develops a drinking problem. Stoner discovers that Katherine has published a book and that it is dedicated to him. He is diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and retires. In his final days, drifting on painkillers, he returns again and again to the question "What did you expect?", wondering whether he could have loved Edith better or been stronger. He decides at last that he is wrong to call himself a failure. Alone one afternoon, watching students pass his window on their way to class, he dies with his one published book falling from his hand.
Why it still matters
Most novels are about people to whom things happen. Stoner is about a man to whom life simply occurs, and it insists that this is worth a book. That is why it failed in 1965 and why it works now. Readers who have come to it in the last twenty years tend to describe the same thing: a plain, unhurried prose style that delivers an emotional blow out of nowhere.
It suits anyone drawn to quiet American fiction, to university settings, or to novels about work and duty. It does not suit a reader wanting plot or consolation. What it offers instead is the rare experience of watching an entire ordinary life laid out honestly from beginning to end.
