Stoner
John Edward Williams
I've had this book sitting on my hard drive for years now, staring at me. I've been stuck reading so many books partway now and instead of cleaning the backlog up (which is what I'll do now) I decided to pick up this book instead, because I've heard nothing but praise about it. And you know what, yes, I think I understand why this is memed as one of the greatest novels never read or whatever. People love their everyman stories, and I am also People, so I did enjoy it.
Stoner is a novel that is both bleak and kind of comforting. It tells you the life story of a university professor who came from a hardworking and humble farmer family, it details his life as he goes through the first and second world war without volunteering, as he falls in love with English literature and teaching, as he falls in love with a woman, falls out of love, has an affair, makes an enemy, has a child, and ultimately dies. The novel begins with his death actually, and sets the scene for what the narrator tells us is a very unremarkable man. I think the time period it was set in lends itself well to the overall tone and the standoffishness of many of the characters, including Stoner himself. He is extremely passive at times to the point of utter frustration, almost ambivalent to all the stuff live throws at him.
Spoiler: I talk a lot about Edith
I think it's very rare for a story to feature a man cheating on his wife and make me feel a bit happy for him, while also not making me hate the wife. Now the second part, I'm not sure if John Williams intended it, or it comes from my, compared to others, infinite understanding for the suffering of womankind, because certainly 90% of people who reviewed this book do not share this view and they absolutely despise Edith as she is the Bad Guy (tm).
I'm mostly just sick of stories with adultery personally, but I am grown enough to understand cheating has one big grey area and life is just complicated like that. Anyway, Edith (Stoner's wife) is a very interesting character I wish we knew more about, but most of the story is told with Stoner being the focus aside from few paragraphs dealing with Edith. She is an excellent example of a woman raised in the early 1900's by weird puritanical upper class parents who want of their female child to be an ornament, almost a sex slave yet she is supposed to know nothing of it while serving her purpose of pleasing her husband. It is extremely paradoxical in a sense and the point of her existence is an oxymoron. And people wonder why so many women were "hysterical" in those times, as the novel likes to repeat that word when describing Edith, a lot. To add to that, it is heavily implied she was sexually abused while not really knowing or understanding what sex was but she learned to find it repulsive. Her ultimate wish throughout the story is to be left alone and to be free which was an impossibility for her. She also seems to have developed a personality disorder because of her abuse, frankly at first I got the impression she was autistic lol. Even though Stoner loved her, he never helped her realize her biggest wish - to go to Europe. I believe that was one of the biggest reasons which led to her resentment of him. She most likely feels as if he stopped her from living her life and truly breaking free (even though a similar fate would await for her anyways most likely). Honestly I am surprised by the amount of reviews from pretty fancy book review blogs that said stuff like "Edith the privileged rich girl nonsensically begins torturing Stoner" when really, it makes perfect sense why she did it. She was truly a product of her environment and she became a horrible person because of it, but it's not nonsensical. She couldn't stand, or rather, comprehend Stoner's honest and pure love for their daughter, so she distanced him away from her and in her mind it made a lot of sense. Fathers are not meant to spend a lot of time with their female children, after all (lest they molest them, duh!). It makes sense to me.
Lastly, Grace's destiny was not solely Edith's fault. Stoner was present the whole time. Stoner's failing came in the form of a lack of self respect, and passivity so big he let it ruin his daughter by not involving himself with her. At the end of the day, it was fine for him to remain passive and indifferent about himself, but the moment Grace got involved into the mix, he should have taken action. You can love someone with your whole heart, but if you don't step in to help them, what good does that love do? And this is his biggest offense, imo.
If you skipped the massive spoiler, the tl;dr is that people tend to massively antagonize Stoner's wife, Edith. Ultimately though, I think it's useless to point fingers at either Edith or Stoner. This is not a story about good vs. evil, it's a story about a mans life and where his decisions (and lack thereof - his fatal flaw) led him. Out of all the head scratching reviews I read about it, my favourite one was written by Miljenko Jergović, a bosnian writer. His conclusion seems to have been the most interesting one even though I don't completely agree with everything in his review:
But as much as Stoner is a victim, so is she. It's just that neither one nor the other fell as victims of "social relations" - as bad literary interpreters would like it to be - but they perished from their fate, as it used to be in ancient tragedies and as it has been until today, in literature and in life..
I believe both of them had the capacity to be different enough from their parents but they never fully realized it. I suppose you could look at this story as a tragedy... it really does have most of the markings of one.
Lastly, more related to Jergović's review than the book itself but he accidentally nailed it when talking about the overall reception of the novel where he said that meanie feminists would totally read this novel as misogynistic if they had actually read it instead of blindly praising it - and while I found this statement really stupid it actually turns out the inverse is true. It's not that stupid silly feminists were outraged over it but some of the less intelligent /lit/ dwellers will praise it for portraying a "femoid" correctly and say how based Williams was for dunking on women which lmao...
Frankly I don't want to dwell on this too much, it probably could be true Williams himself was a misogynist man, but regardless of that fact I believe he (accidentally or not) managed to make a pretty accurate portrayal of two people who had their destiny set out for them by being born into the families and the time that they were. I believe good writers can create characters realistically and with tact despite their biases and examining someones background before deciding whether or not I approve of their character portrayals is too exhausting for me...
This turned out to be one of my biggest reviews I feel like. There's definitely a lot to talk about here like the feud Stoner had with Lomax, his friendship with Finch and Masters, the implications of the effects of war on a person Stoner had the utmost respect for, his love affair, his daughters pain, the oral exam with Walker... But I guess this Stoner/Edith relationshipped gripped me the most.
