John Williams's Stoner

Any novel whose primary setting is academia ought, by all accounts, to be an utterly atrocious affair.  Campus politics, bureaucracy, careerism, the jargon of each minutely specialized discipline creating its own little dialect incomprehensible to those outside (and sometimes those within) its little sphere--such things may arguably be necessary for the university to function, but they make for tedious reading.  John Williams's Stoner, which takes place almost entirely on a fictionalized version of the University of Missouri's campus in the early to middle twentieth century, is, however, a lucid and subtly brilliant novel.

The protagonist of the novel, the eponymous William Stoner, is a well-chiseled everyman of academia.  Having fled the university long ago, I had forgotten that such a character could exist; the professors had all dwindled into shadowy stereotypes in my mind, and they had lost their humanity in my remembrances.  Stoner is fully human, though, and any English major will see himself or herself reflected to some extent in Stoner's sensibilities.  Indeed, the shock of Stoner's first epiphany--the one that changes him, suddenly and irrevocably, less like a proverbial bolt of lightning than like a jolt of electroshock therapy--from a studious but uninspired agriculture student to an English major, and which eventually sets him on the track to professorship, will sting in a familiar way to many of us.  Here, the mechanism is a Shakespearean sonnet, the sturdy and familiar number 73, the meaning of which utterly eludes Stoner.  Rather than the meaning being transmitted in some kind of powerful way, it is the simple profundity of the speech act itself that impresses Stoner--that someone, centuries ago, would see fit to reach out to him, to speak to him, to try to say something at all.  The voice may be incoherent to Stoner, but he hears it, and it changes him.  It's as though he suffers a stroke in the middle of class and then refuses to tell anyone about it.

From this moment, Williams follows Stoner's life through his marriage, through the modest peaks and petty vales of his career, through fatherhood, to his final days.  Throughout it all, the key aspect of the somewhat Prufrockian Stoner's character is the discrepancy--the vast gulf, really--separating what he knows and experiences in his mind from what he is able to express.  This is also what gives the novel its poignancy.  Stoner's life is, in the end, generally insignificant, but simultaneously worthwhile.  Stoner is affecting for the subtle revelation of humanity that it offers carefully and quietly to the reader.