This is an easy post to write because a) I’ve only completed reading one book this month, b) it’s a book for the Curious Fox book club which means I’ve discussed this at length with many people. The reason why I’ve only read one book is because at the same time I’m reading Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed. It’s a book that I bought two years ago when I was heartbroken and I foolishly thought that there was nothing left to lose, so I might as well read a big history book that will take me months to finish (at time of writing, I’m currently about 50% through, which is not so bad).
Stoner by John Williams
There’s a particular pleasure in discovering that a book everyone else has read has somehow managed to escape your attention: it’s like finding out there’s been a room in your house all along that you simply never noticed. My coworker mentioned in passing once he saw it laying next to my work laptop that he has read it and actually loves it, while about three or four people in the book club mentioned that they had read this before. I didn’t tell anyone that at first when I heard the title, I thought it was about marijuana enthusiasts rather than what it actually is: an American classic about a literature professor.
Stoner follows the story of a literature professor who comes from a family of farmers, and he was sent to agricultural college by parents who expect him to return improved but unchanged. Instead, he falls in love—not with a person, but with literature, refuses to come back home, and this quiet rebellion shapes the rest of his ordinary, extraordinary life. I called it a rebellion because it was truly a rebellion in the grand scheme of things: for the rest of his life, he seemed to be a passive actor of his own life, resulting in a life of mundanities instead of grand adventures one would expect from the main character of a novel.
But the miracle of John Williams’ novel is in how it transforms mundanity into meaning through prose so crystalline it feels like looking through perfectly clean glass. I told my boyfriend upon reading the first page that it read like “a Wikipedia entry,” which sounds like a criticism but was actually my stumbling attempt to describe how the third-person narration achieves a kind of detachment that somehow makes Stoner’s unremarkable life utterly compelling.
There’s something subversive about a novel that insists we pay attention to a man who rarely demands attention for himself, especially in today in a world where you are encouraged to live bold and be the main character of your life. Stoner is anything but: he moves through his life—his disappointing marriage, his professional setbacks, his love affair—with a passivity that should frustrate but instead fascinates, and it still baffles me how Williams managed to make me care so deeply about someone I neither relate to nor admire.
What do we expect from the protagonists of our novels? That they inspire us, teach us, show us how to live better lives? Stoner does none of these things. His choices range from puzzling to—especially towards the end—maddening. He accepts treatments that would send me storming into therapy. And yet I couldn’t look away, and I’m not even mad to have spent hours getting to know him, knowing that I probably wouldn’t walk away with newly found moral lessons.
By the novel’s end, when Williams subtly shifts his detached prose that I’ve gotten used to reflect Stoner’s changing relationship with time and self, I realized how rare it is to discover that a quiet story about an unremarkable man can leave such a remarkable impression. Stoner reminds us that great literature doesn’t always announce itself with fireworks; sometimes it simply takes your hand and leads you through a life you never expected to value.