Steve Almond read Stoner a dozen times, grappling with its messages and why it brings him back time after time. He offers us a Stoner who shows the "devotion to the inner life," a lost art in a culture fixated on wealth and consumerism and entertainment.
I have read Stoner twice. I picked up an ebook on sale because I liked the cover art, a painting by John Singer Sargent. I got the 'Stoner' bug and was soon touting it, part of its rediscovery by readers.
Stoner is the story of a man whose hardscrabble farmer father sends him to university to study agriculture. Stoner is baffled by literature and is moved to understand. His professor understands that Stoner has fallen in love with literature and is destined to become a teacher. The story follows his career, his unhappy marriage, alienation from his daughter, his love affair, and departmental battles. And then--he dies of cancer. In the end, Stoner forgives his wife and himself and accepts that his choices were the only ones he could have made.
The novel breaks the rules for a best-seller, and Williams knew it when he wrote it. From the old-fashioned narration and the lack of page-turning action to the focus on a sad character whose choices bring him pain. And yet...we are carried away by the story. It is about the choices we make and don't make, how we marry for lust and are ruined by lovelessness, how sticking to our values can destroy our careers.
Almond becomes deeply personal, sharing his own decisions and failures and history and how William Stoner reflected his life back to him, helping him to understand himself and better himself.
Almond probes Stoner's wife, making her a more fully realized character for readers. Almond's wife would like to hear Edith's side of the story, how sexual abuse and the lack of choice for women in 1928 caged her into a life she did not want. Edith gives up their newborn daughter to Stoner's care; later, jealous, she reclaims the child and alienates her from her father. The child suffers but Stoner cannot see any choice but to allow it. The girl is broken by this and it destroys her.
Stoner's squabbles with the English department head, Lomax, shows "the difficulty of standing up for yourself in the world, the price you pay when you fail to do so, and the price you pay when you succeed." Stoner wants to uphold the "intellectual purity of the academy" but feuding with the powerful can't result in victory.
Was Stoner a masochist? Growing up on a farm, was he so used to being the victim of uncontrollable forces that he sought out failure? On his death bed, Stoner's daughter remarks, "things haven't been easy for you, have they?" to which he replies, "I suppose I didn't want them to be."
Almond looks at the theme of class in Stoner. Marrying Edith, a pampered girl from the upper classes and embracing a career as a teacher brings Stoner far up the ladder from the manual labor and subsistence life on his family farm. Almond writes that Stoner "show us what happens when the poor farm boy actually gets the rich girl, which is that he winds up in hell."
During WWI, Stoner's two best friends at university go to war while he is talked out of it by his professor. Stoner is perfectly happy in his cell, searching literature for truth and beauty.
There are moments of joy in Stoner's life, particularly when he falls in love with Katherine, a young instructor. Sharing the intellectual life leads to carnal love until Lomax holds the affair over Stoner's head to threaten his career. The interlude allows reflections on love. Stoner must choose between human love and the love of teaching.
It is teaching that Stoner loves the most, the idealized vision of preserving and passing on the heritage of literature. Over and over he chooses teaching--instead of enlisting, instead of divorce, instead of a good relationship with his boss. Literature is his first love and Stoner never abandons her.
On his death bed, Stoner asks if his life had value or if he was a failure. Williams wrote that Stoner "had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality." In a flash of insight, Stoner realizes that failure didn't matter. "He was himself, and he knew what he had been." And that is the beauty of the novel. It is enough to be oneself. To stay true to who one is. Nothing else matters in the end. In the battle for the inner life, Stoner had won.
Throughout the book, Almond connects his subject to contemporary American politics, concluding that "Americans are conflict junkies" and when politicians don't fight back we lose interest. "Going high" as Stoner did may win the battle but it loses the fight.
Almond's book was enjoyable for the insights into John William's "perfect novel" and also for a deep understanding of how a novel can impact a reader.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life
Steve Almond
IG Bookmarked Series
ISBN: 978-1632460875
Publication: June 18, 2019
14.95 paperback
Click on these links to learn more about John Williams and Stoner
The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel
Stoner and rereading Stoner
Augustus
Nothing But the Night
