Book Reviews - Review 290

This is the life story of William Stoner, a quiet English lecturer in a university in the American Mid-west. After growing up as an only child to poor farming parents, Stoner goes to university, develops a passion for literature, gets an academic post, and proceeds to lead an unassuming, rather sad life. His academic career is unremarkable, he gets embroiled in long-standing, unpleasant university political disputes, has few friends, and marries a woman he doesn't get on with. The only beacons of light in his life are his studies, his relationship with his daughter, and a short-lived romantic affair he engages in in middle age.

Stoner is a poignant novel of considerable psychological insight. Williams successfully conveys the sense of a life the seeds of whose sadness are planted in a lonely childhood; and of a character that stoically accepts disappointment while being appreciative of the few crumbs of solace in his existence, and always taking care to behave as decently to others as his circumstances and his personality allow.

Nevertheless, I don't think Stoner is quite the lost masterpiece that some critics are currently claiming. Like a lot of books that are initially underrated, it is swinging to being overrated. One suspects that Williams wrote the novel quickly and easily, because it contains a fair few inconsistencies (for example, we're told that Stoner hears his wife cry for the first time on page 81, when she has cried on page 65; we're told in the first paragraph that "few students remembered him with any sharpness", whereas later on he is portrayed as an intermittently charismatic lecturer).

There's a certain lack of attention to detail. We are informed that Stoner's thesis was on "one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales". Which one? On one level it's not important, but clearly it was important to Stoner, and it's he who is the novel's subject. Stoner is impressed by the dissertation of the woman who becomes his lover; but we are told nothing about what impresses him in her writing. And when Stoner's mother dies, no mention is made of how.

While one can argue that this all makes for "spare" writing, for me it created the impression, rather, of hurried writing. I felt sometimes that Williams was leaving information out because he wasn't really interested in inventing it. On top of this, the portrayal of Stoner's wife Edith feels one-sided: too often she is the mere caricature of repressed, self-centred womanhood, put on this earth merely to thwart her husband's happiness rather than to be allowed her own regrets and psychological journey.

Williams's prose is clear and fluent, and that makes Stoner an agreeably easy book to get through; but only occasionally are its insights and descriptions truly poetic (an example: "He leaned back on the couch and looked at the low, dim ceiling that had been the sky of their world.") It's an unusual and memorable novel, but it lacks the broad human sympathy and the descriptive power that would make it a great one. Perhaps if it were leavened with a touch of humour, its flaws would be less apparent.