John Williams’ life was chronicled in a biography titled The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, which set up said novel for reviews titled like this and this.
Calling a novel “perfect” will perpetually be an exaggeration, since the form of the novel is so varied that nailing down just what it is that renders one perfect is impossible. Yet Stoner undeniably elevates itself through its prose, which is frictionless and pointed and carries the melancholic Stoner through unfortunate happenings, from adolescence to death.
The content of these reviews often focuses not on this prose but on Williams’ portrayal of Edith, Stoner’s unhappy and bitter wife. She is a stereotypical “crazy bitch” who’s sole purpose, they say, is to vampirically drain love from her husband’s life. She alienates herself from Stoner directly and comes between what might have been a redemptive relationship for Stoner with his daughter, Grace. The novel’s treatment of the narrator as somewhat keen to Stoner’s thoughts and sympathetic to his plights means many read the novel as if Stoner is a hero.
This is wrong, I think (although the author has stated that he considers Stoner a hero). Stoner’s life consists of three events, in a technical sense. These events are 1) his departure from his family’s farm to his life-long commitment to the university, 2) his cultivating a love affair with Katherine Driscoll, and 3) his eventual (and extremely delayed) rebellion against Holly Lomax. The energy required to make that first event was enormous: He cast aside the farm, home, and life set before him and willingly walked the path that led to dull emotionlessness at his parent’s deaths — motivated by nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of the sublime in a sophomore survey course. Never again does Stoner act in such a manner, even though such movement would have redeemed his life.
Stoner should have left Edith; not to live a life with Katherine, but to avoid the lifelong trials that followed his resignation into the marriage. Such a movement was possible, given his first movement from home to university. Then at the second event, Stoner realizes love in a higher form. Yet both Stoner and Katherine hold on to the temporary, even though permanence is within their reach. The third event’s severe delay, after decades of compromising his teaching, ostensibly his only joy and meaning, cements Stoner’s dwindled vigor from the first event.
So Stoner is not a hero, nor is William’s a mysogonist. Stoner is a man who walked into a life marked by long passages of time of cold intellectual work and misery of the heart and refused to leave. Edith was a victim of Stoner’s inactivity and social norms osmosed through the sitting rooms and parlour chats of her life. Edith is certainly a dark character, whose revenge plots against the stoic husband veer into evil, calling such behavior that of a “crazy bitch” is a form of gender essentialism itself. Is not the character of Holly Lomax a “cold bitch” or “ice queen”, if not for his gender? Using identity as a means of critique for the novel reduces its primary source of value — the prose — into one-off lines in many reviews.
The only thing that can carry a reader through a novel like Stoner, in which the lead character is fumbling, uncharismatic, and largely emotionless, and whose entire life is the sole focus of the story, is the prose that flows like heavy rain down a stair. It is not gentle, nor is it relentless. It is precisely balanced, so much so that reading it gives the immediate sensation of perfection that may have inspired the biography’s title.
The simple content of the novel leaves infinite space to contemplate and converse, as a good novel should, and its prose elevates its simplicity into a classic.