Introduction
Stoner has a voice you can recognize before you know whose voice it is. There’s something lovely about hearing a few lines of Butcher’s Crossing and being taken straight back to a book I left unfinished fifteen years earlier. Hypnotic and somber, Williams’s sentences are so measured that you can hear the feeling in what he leaves unsaid.
Summary
William Stoner grows up on a Missouri farm and goes to the state university to study agriculture. In a required literature course, a professor asks him to explain Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Stoner can barely speak, but something has happened to him. He changes his course of study, becomes a teacher, and spends his working life at the same university.
Williams tells us on the first page that Stoner never rises above the rank of associate professor and that few people remember him after his death. The novel then takes us inside the life that brief account disposes of so efficiently. There is a painful marriage, a daughter he loves, a feud with a colleague that begins over academic standards and becomes deeply personal, and an unexpected chance at happiness. Running through it all is his devotion to literature, which gives him a life he could never have imagined on the farm.
Review
For me, the extraordinary thing about Stoner is that Williams makes you feel the value of Stoner’s life without ever having to make him heroic. His patience can be admirable or maddening. He can stand his ground in a university dispute and then fail to speak when you desperately want him to at home. Some of the book’s most painful moments come from realizing how much he sees and how little he can bring himself to do about it.
My one reservation is Edith, his wife. Williams gives her enough history to suggest a woman with her own thwarted life, and there are moments when you can almost glimpse the novel from her side. I wish he had stayed with her longer in those moments. We know the cost of the marriage to Stoner with a precision we rarely get for Edith.
The scene with Shakespeare stays with me because Stoner’s first great encounter with literature leaves him speechless. A man who will spend decades teaching people how to read begins by finding that he cannot explain what a poem has done to him. Williams trusts the reader to understand that silence. The novel is especially absorbing in audio, where you have to sit with the pause before the next sentence comes.
I read three chapters, put the book down for fifteen years, and recognized its voice almost immediately. I think that’s the best description of the hold Stoner can have over you.
