Stoner
by John Williams
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Description
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. show more Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams' deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, standing in stark relief against an unforgiving world. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
Petroglyph Both "Stoner" and "The professor's house" deal with a small-town university professor vaguely comfortable with his family life, who fits uneasily in a new life that sorta kinda happened to him while he was focusing on his work. Both present compelling immersions in bittersweet nostalgia and the ever-present sense that life could have gone entirely different (and perhaps it should have).
Also recommended by shaunie
30
SCPeterson Melancholy main characters whose devotion to duty is met with disappointment and lack of fulfillment in life and love
20
by shaunie
potenza Comparable tone / period / moral messaging.
quartzite Young gets involved with wrong woman.
quartzite Young man gets involved wit the wrong woman,
quartzite Young man gets involved with the wrong woman.
Member Reviews
I'd like to read this book from the perspective of Stoner's wife, Edith. I found that Williams' portrayal of Edith dismisses her character's depth, depicting her as the 'crazy woman' without taking thoughtful effort to confront her described trauma as what it was: trauma. For instance, I feel quite confident that her childhood neglect and experience of spousal rape early in her marriage made her feel - among many things - unsafe in her home, no doubt influencing her relationship with her quiet, sexually violent husband and later her own daughter. Williams merely passes off her depression as crazy, her fear and anger as hysterical, and her manipulation to remove her daughter from Stoner's life as evil.
Williams, who taught university English, did not think a novel (or a poem) was “something to be studied and understood rather than experienced.” He was asked, “And literature is written to be entertaining?” and he answered “Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid.”
At some point in the book I realized that I loved Stoner – loved him as a person. I had similar feelings for Renée and Paloma when I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Coming to love characters in a novel isn’t necessarily what I look for (and doesn’t happen often), nor is it required in order for me to say it is a wonderful book. But when it does happen, then I do think it is a wonderful book.
Stoner is a wonderful book, not only because of my show more feelings for its protagonist, but also because of its beautiful prose and because the university setting where it takes place was somewhat familiar to me and thus raised all kinds of images of the past and what might have been in my own life.
I used to belong to an online book group where, had I said that I loved this book because I loved the main character, I would have been ridiculed. In fact, I did say such things in that group, and I was ridiculed. I finally quit the group and eventually realized that not only do I not care to be ridiculed, I also don’t care to participate in studies and analyses of novels. I like to know when someone likes or doesn’t like a book, and I like to know something about why.
I dont' often give a "5." I think Stoner is a beautiful book. It is described in the introduction as “an escape into reality” and that reality is beautifully presented and works for me. show less
At some point in the book I realized that I loved Stoner – loved him as a person. I had similar feelings for Renée and Paloma when I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Coming to love characters in a novel isn’t necessarily what I look for (and doesn’t happen often), nor is it required in order for me to say it is a wonderful book. But when it does happen, then I do think it is a wonderful book.
Stoner is a wonderful book, not only because of my show more feelings for its protagonist, but also because of its beautiful prose and because the university setting where it takes place was somewhat familiar to me and thus raised all kinds of images of the past and what might have been in my own life.
I used to belong to an online book group where, had I said that I loved this book because I loved the main character, I would have been ridiculed. In fact, I did say such things in that group, and I was ridiculed. I finally quit the group and eventually realized that not only do I not care to be ridiculed, I also don’t care to participate in studies and analyses of novels. I like to know when someone likes or doesn’t like a book, and I like to know something about why.
I dont' often give a "5." I think Stoner is a beautiful book. It is described in the introduction as “an escape into reality” and that reality is beautifully presented and works for me. show less
By the end of this novel, it felt like some remarkable tale of heroism had been told and William Stoner laid down his Herculean burden and died. But upon reflection it is hard to see what was really heroic as much as common and usual. I guess that I appreciate this the most about the novel, that Williams makes the drudgery of the everyday bigger and more meaningful and more impactful than it really is. I would wager that for many of us, our daily existence seems equally big and important while simultaneously being small and of little consequence in the world at large. I don’t mean for this to sound grim and I don’t think that Williams does either.
Maybe like Stoner, we follow the lights that guide us, some of which we hold in our show more hands and some that are out there in the darkness. The path that lies between us and those lights may be easy or difficult to follow but you almost don’t know until you’ve already started. So, maybe I do see Stoner as a hero and maybe even a triumphant one.
And William’s writing style is so nice, spare and completely fitting to the story. I look forward to reading more of Williams’ work.
There were a few things that bothered me a bit, but nothing to really drag down my rating. For one, there is not much introspection, which is a little surprising, given Stoner’s profession and his tendency to hold on to exact quotes from his friends (deceased and living) decades after having been spoken, but insofar as this is a novel about the persistence of everyday existence, the lack of reflection doesn’t seem wholly out of place. How many of us really give much effort to introspection on the daily?
For another, I might have liked more development of the supporting characters, but I could see how deflecting narrative toward them would have relieved some of the grind of living in Stoner’s daily existence. Edith, however, I’m not sure that characterization was necessary. It surely wasn’t flattering. show less
Maybe like Stoner, we follow the lights that guide us, some of which we hold in our show more hands and some that are out there in the darkness. The path that lies between us and those lights may be easy or difficult to follow but you almost don’t know until you’ve already started. So, maybe I do see Stoner as a hero and maybe even a triumphant one.
And William’s writing style is so nice, spare and completely fitting to the story. I look forward to reading more of Williams’ work.
There were a few things that bothered me a bit, but nothing to really drag down my rating. For one, there is not much introspection, which is a little surprising, given Stoner’s profession and his tendency to hold on to exact quotes from his friends (deceased and living) decades after having been spoken, but insofar as this is a novel about the persistence of everyday existence, the lack of reflection doesn’t seem wholly out of place. How many of us really give much effort to introspection on the daily?
For another, I might have liked more development of the supporting characters, but I could see how deflecting narrative toward them would have relieved some of the grind of living in Stoner’s daily existence. Edith, however, I’m not sure that characterization was necessary. It surely wasn’t flattering. show less
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends show more under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
I BOUGHT A PAPERBACK FROM THE PUBLISHER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. THANK YOU, PAST SELF.
My Review: I went into this read thinking it'd be another wildly overpraised midcentury modern grimfest. I was happily proved wrong, though that is the last time I will ever use the word "happy" in conjunction with this tale.
A story about a small Prufrockian man, doomed from the get-go to a disappointing existence unworthy of the descriptor "life" by any but the most generous definition of the subject. Author Alex Preston (Goodreads profile link), in a 2015 review he blogged, said of Stoner:
Scathing! Angry, upset, and not wrong in any way. Yet, as Author Preston's fury warms my heart, I am required by my own appreciation of the story to admit that I found these very things to be the raison d'etre of the novel, and the beating heart of John Williams' artistry. He told a failure's life in a failure's language; he accepted Stoner as the small, ungreased cog in a small, janky machine full of others like him that Williams himself was.
So, while very aware of this divisive thematic and stylistic choice will not be to everyone's taste, I can honestly and wholeheartedly say it was very much to mine.
Casey Affleck was set to portray Stoner in the film! (Although ten years on, I think we're safe to assume the project has spluttered out.) This was excellent news! I...enjoyed, liked, all those words seem full of misplaced chirpiness applied to Stoner's small, cramped life...resonated with this novel and after seeing Mr. Affleck in Manchester by the Sea I can only be happy and grateful he might yet assume the leading role in it. show less
The Publisher Says: Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends show more under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
I BOUGHT A PAPERBACK FROM THE PUBLISHER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. THANK YOU, PAST SELF.
My Review: I went into this read thinking it'd be another wildly overpraised midcentury modern grimfest. I was happily proved wrong, though that is the last time I will ever use the word "happy" in conjunction with this tale.
A story about a small Prufrockian man, doomed from the get-go to a disappointing existence unworthy of the descriptor "life" by any but the most generous definition of the subject. Author Alex Preston (Goodreads profile link), in a 2015 review he blogged, said of Stoner:
With each of Stoner’s defeats, he backs further and further away from us, his voice becoming more distant, his character less alive on the page. At the start of the novel, I was yelling at him to grow a pair. By the time he lets his wife sacrifice their daughter on the altar of her motiveless malignancy, I’d given up on him entirely. I read through to the end because I wanted to see if...there would be something elegiac, a note of quiet redemption in the final passages of the book. There wasn’t.
Scathing! Angry, upset, and not wrong in any way. Yet, as Author Preston's fury warms my heart, I am required by my own appreciation of the story to admit that I found these very things to be the raison d'etre of the novel, and the beating heart of John Williams' artistry. He told a failure's life in a failure's language; he accepted Stoner as the small, ungreased cog in a small, janky machine full of others like him that Williams himself was.
So, while very aware of this divisive thematic and stylistic choice will not be to everyone's taste, I can honestly and wholeheartedly say it was very much to mine.
Casey Affleck was set to portray Stoner in the film! (Although ten years on, I think we're safe to assume the project has spluttered out.) This was excellent news! I...enjoyed, liked, all those words seem full of misplaced chirpiness applied to Stoner's small, cramped life...resonated with this novel and after seeing Mr. Affleck in Manchester by the Sea I can only be happy and grateful he might yet assume the leading role in it. show less
I finished Stoner three days ago, and it is still front and center. I had high expectations. What can you say when even high expectations are surpassed? Thank you? Stoner was a quiet novel. In that sense it reminded me of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, both of which I still enjoy thinking about. Stoner is a life: beginning to end. Lots of pain. Some joy. Was it an average life? A mediocre life? Perhaps, even a disappointing life? No, the success and ultimate joy was in the work, pursued at times with passion, but always with persistence, doggedness and commitment. I will forever wonder what motivated or caused William Stoner’s wife, Edith, to be who she is. How many of us lead a life someone show more would want to read about? After reading Stoner, I believe that as long as John Williams is doing the writing, all of our lives are readable. show less
A vida simples de William Stoner: a sua infância e adolescência numa quinta isolada de um Estado ignorado dos EUA na primeira metade do século XX; a partida para a Universidade onde fará carreira como professor universitário, o casamento e a filha, os alunos, o grande amigo e o grande inimigo, a amante, a reforma e a morte. Parece linear, mas nenhuma vida é linear, e William Stoner tem uma forma peculiar de encarar a vida: sem ansiedade em relação ao futuro e sem angústias em relação ao passado. Vive para o presente, para o trabalho, para o dever, para o que acha justo e para o que entusiasma. Mas Stoner também é peculiar a encarar a morte: quase como mais um passo lógico, uma fatalidade contra a qual não vale a pena show more lutar, "business as usual", sem dramas nem emoções.
"Chegara aquela idade em que lhe ocorria, com crescente intensidade, uma pergunta de uma simplicidade tão avassaladora que não tinha como a enfrentar. Dava por si a perguntar-se se a vida valeria a pena,se alguma vez valera a pena. Era uma pergunta, desconfiava ele, que assolava todos os homens a uma dada altura; perguntou-se se os assolaria com uma força tão impessoal como o assolava a ele. A pergunta acarretava uma tristeza, mas era uma tristeza geral que (pensava ele) pouco tinha que ver consigo ou com o seu destino em particular."
A escrita é simples (como Stoner?), fluente e enxuta, mas ao mesmo tempo envolvente, credível e perspicaz. Sentimos-nos na pele de William Stoner, sofremos as suas dores, partilhamos as suas alegrias, e por isso compreendemos melhor o seu olhar pessimista (ou realista?) e pungente que nos obriga a recordar quão breve a vida é quão inevitável o nosso destino. show less
"Chegara aquela idade em que lhe ocorria, com crescente intensidade, uma pergunta de uma simplicidade tão avassaladora que não tinha como a enfrentar. Dava por si a perguntar-se se a vida valeria a pena,se alguma vez valera a pena. Era uma pergunta, desconfiava ele, que assolava todos os homens a uma dada altura; perguntou-se se os assolaria com uma força tão impessoal como o assolava a ele. A pergunta acarretava uma tristeza, mas era uma tristeza geral que (pensava ele) pouco tinha que ver consigo ou com o seu destino em particular."
A escrita é simples (como Stoner?), fluente e enxuta, mas ao mesmo tempo envolvente, credível e perspicaz. Sentimos-nos na pele de William Stoner, sofremos as suas dores, partilhamos as suas alegrias, e por isso compreendemos melhor o seu olhar pessimista (ou realista?) e pungente que nos obriga a recordar quão breve a vida é quão inevitável o nosso destino. show less
The sadness in this book is like an undertow pulling you down, down. It ensnares you in its relentless progress, its tone.
William Stoner comes from a rural farming community and is sent off to the new agricultural college. Slowly however he is wooed away from studying the land and finds sanctuary (for one can't at this stage call it passion) in literature. Stoner is quiet in almost everything he does, he quietly becomes a teacher, and for years is good without being inspirational. He rejects going to war for no reason one can name, not even cowardice. He marries a woman for whom perhaps he feels his first passion, but she is damaged goods in regards to her mental state. But she is destructive in her effect on his life and here somehow show more he begins to become a victim of circumstance.
There is a brief reprieve, in a love affair mid-life, but ultmately the downward spiral of Stoners life persues him to the end. 50 pages from the novels conclusion I could feel my body tightening, hardly bearing what lay ahead for this man.
Williams keeps his nerve throughout, the tone never falters. Stoner never becomes something beyond his capacity. show less
William Stoner comes from a rural farming community and is sent off to the new agricultural college. Slowly however he is wooed away from studying the land and finds sanctuary (for one can't at this stage call it passion) in literature. Stoner is quiet in almost everything he does, he quietly becomes a teacher, and for years is good without being inspirational. He rejects going to war for no reason one can name, not even cowardice. He marries a woman for whom perhaps he feels his first passion, but she is damaged goods in regards to her mental state. But she is destructive in her effect on his life and here somehow show more he begins to become a victim of circumstance.
There is a brief reprieve, in a love affair mid-life, but ultmately the downward spiral of Stoners life persues him to the end. 50 pages from the novels conclusion I could feel my body tightening, hardly bearing what lay ahead for this man.
Williams keeps his nerve throughout, the tone never falters. Stoner never becomes something beyond his capacity. show less
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Part of “Stoner” ’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair. Stoner realizes at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them, not in some obscure scholarly Grail but in its pursuit. His life has not been squandered in mediocrity and obscurity; his undistinguished career has not been show more mulish labor but an act of devotion. He has been a priest of literature, and given himself as fully as he could to the thing he loved. The book’s conclusion, such as it is—I don’t know whether to call it a consolation or a warning—is that there is nothing better in this life. The line, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial,” is like the novel’s own epitaph. Its last image is of the book falling from lifeless fingers into silence. show less
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Awards
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Notable Lists
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Stoner
- Original title
- Stoner
- Original publication date
- 1965
- People/Characters
- Katherine Driscoll; William Stoner; Grace Stoner; Edith Stoner; Gordon Finch; David Masters (show all 7); Hollis Lomax
- Important places
- Columbia, Missouri, USA
- Important events
- World War I (1914 | 1918); World War II (1939 | 1945)
- Dedication
- This book is dedicated to my friends and former colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Missouri. They will recognize at once that it is a work of fiction--that no character portrayed in it is based upon ... (show all)any person, living or dead, and that no event has its counterpart in the reality we knew at the University of Missouri. They will also realize that I have taken certain liberties, both physical and historical, with the University of Missouri, so that in effect it, too, is a fictional place.
- First words
- William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.
- Quotations
- He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.
In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had nearned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which... (show all) one person attempts to know another. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The fingers loosened, and the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly across the still body and fell into the silence of the room.
- Blurbers
- Snow, C. P.; Howe, Irving; McEwan, Ian
- Original language
- English
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- 37