Published in 1965, John Williams’ novel must have felt, at the time, like a quiet anachronism. It has aged differently. The prose is plain and deeply assured.
Stoner, raised on a poor Missouri farm, discovers literature late and becomes a university teacher. He struggles. His marriage falters. His work brings solace, sometimes:
Sometimes immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know… the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realised the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
Williams writes with restraint, even when describing sorrow. The marriage is grim. The slow estrangement from his daughter, more so. But the novel allows brief moments of grace: friendship, the quiet transformations of reading, a kind of love that doesn’t require fulfilment.
Read alongside Remainder, Stoner feels like its opposite: an escape into clarity. Not simple, but lucid. Williams offers no tricks, just a deepening calm. McGahern, in his introduction, borrows Williams’ own phrase: “an escape into reality.” That is precisely right. The novel’s power is not that it invents but that it attends; it watches a life with the patience that life itself refused its subject.
One passage, marked in the margin, captures what reading does for Stoner, and perhaps for any reader:
He moved outward from himself into the world which contained him, so that he knew the poem of Milton’s that he read or the essay of Bacon’s… changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence on it.
Interested in the McTeague link as I have a special friendship with that book, all of Norris’s books really. Took this out to read a few weeks back and then it disappeared. Truly. This never happens to me. I have never lost a book before. Now for that reason and yours here, I think I just have to woman up and go buy another.
I never thought to read any other of Norris’s books, despite enjoying McTeague, which is unlikely given my tendency toward completion. You have a rare treat ahead, Frances, with Stoner.
I never thought to read any other of Norris’s books, despite enjoying McTeague, which is unlikely given my tendency toward completion. You have a rare treat ahead, Frances, with Stoner.