REVIEW: STONER...QUIET DESPERATION

ERIC'S REVIEW

Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to to their grave with their song still within them. Stoner, by John L. Williams, is a book about an unremarkable life.  Due to circumstances and his own nature, the protagonist, a college professor from a hardscrabble farming background, trapped in a loveless marriage, hemmed in by a career which peaked early, and deprived by societal conventions from pursuing his true love, ends up with his song silenced by life and the path he has taken. It is the path of least resistance, and unlike Frost's the road less travelled by, it ultimately leads nowhere.

Stoner is everyman, and his life is what Ortega y Gasset described: mi vida es yo y mi circunstancia. My life is me and my circumstance.  

He goes to college to escape the grim reality of subsistence farming, ostensibly to study agriculture. His attention is diverted to literature, and avoiding the first world war, which claims one of the triumvirate of himself and two friends, continues on in academia. He marries a thin lipped woman (my father once wisely advised me to avoid them). Their marriage is a long running silent attrition, with a wife for whom "anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. " He has a child. A lover half his age. A long running battle which he loses with a spiteful and bitter boss. He publishes one book which sinks without a trace. He loses them all, one way or another, though he bears his fate calmly and bides his time to exact a manner of revenge. He gets cancer. Fin bref, as they say in French, game over. 

The diary of Stoner's life is filled largely with disappointments kept. At one point in mid-life he reaches a nadir where "he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy, and nothing behind him that he cared to remember." The book makes for easy, but not particularly pleasant reading, and though one can identify and sympathize with the monotone playing in the background, the overall result is that of a song left unsung by a man for whom quiet desperation became a way of life. 

3.5 out of five

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TOM'S REVIEW

STONER

Ellmore Leonard famously had ten rules for fictionwriting, a list that started as something of a joke but eventually became legendary—like the singer Tom Jones.  

I have three rules:

1.

Never describe when you can dramatise.

2.

Allow at least 10 pages for every year you chronicle.

3.

Don’t doom your characters.  

Ok, fair enough, I came up with this list after reading Stoner.The components had kicked around the back of my brain for 35 years, but Stoner made me want to write them down.  

Because Stoner is not the novel as sweeping panorama or microscopic dissection or even self-conscious art.  It is the novel as thesis. I get the feeling lifetime academic John Williams wrote Stoner to meet the publish-or-perish clause ofhis tenure application.  The writing is meticulous; the plot,lean; the characters, archetypal.  I can just see the members ofthe PhD review committee nodding their heads in condescending but impressed approval.  

But a storyteller’s job is not to satisfy critics or academics or award boards, just as it’s not to reach the widest possible audience.  It should be to dramatise with plot, character, setting and theme through language which at its best is lyrical. The best novels excel at all five elements.  The job of the thesis writer, on the other hand, is to analyse, describe and explain through language that should be purposely precise.  The chronicle of William Stoner’s 46 years at the University of Missouri is a life precisely described and explained.  It is too rarely dramatised.

What drama there is—fellow-student Masters’ rant in a pub; Stoner’s first meeting with future wife Elizabeth’s parents; his oral-exam grilling of the graduate student Walker—stands out from the mass of a story chronicling in 300 pages a 46-yearlife of quiet resignation.  Stoner makes one difficult decision in his life and it comes at the very beginning of the story when he breaks with his family and fate by abandoning agricultural studies for literature.  After that, it’s a life characterised by acceptance. As Masters tells Stoner early on in the novel,“You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world.  You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong…. You have the lean and hungry look, sure enough. You’re doomed.”

Unlike the original possessor of the lean and hungry look, Cassius in Julius Caesar, William Stoner is virtuallyambitionless once he receives his PhD.  Even as he pursuesElizabeth’s hand and takes a stand against Walker, he resigns himself to the lifetime of joylessness that results from twoevents which in any life—let alone a storied one—would just about merit a diary entry.  Even his brief love affair with the graduate student Katherine Driscoll—his one hope for happiness—is something he slips into before allowing it tofade away.  Buddy Holly, let alone Mick Jagger, he is not.    

All of which in my mind makes him positively un-American. That may explain why Stoner, first published in 1956, is enjoying a revival here in Blighty, where the special relationship is best enjoyed with a dash of schadenfreude.  The American ideal is to refuse to accept fate or die trying, while the traditional British way is to take life on the chin with a stiff upper lip, an ironic aside or a cheeky bittersweet grumble. William Stoner can’t even manage that.    

Two stars.