“Stoner” by John Williams

This is a tragic novel that details the course of a man’s life. William Stoner grew up on a small farm, was the first in his family to attend college, and became a Professor of Literature at the University of Missouri. However, there is extreme melancholy that seems to follow Stoner as he progresses through each stage of his life. First, he comes to the realization that he wants to study literature and not agriculture at university, therefore, never returning to help his parents on the family farm. “He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love…. But he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss.” The plot weaves its way through life on the university campus during both World Wars, as well as the Great Depression. “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back.” Personally, Stoner is trapped in a strangely loveless marriage. “Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.” Stoner makes only two friends during the course of his life: fellow graduate students, one who dies at the front during the First World War, and another, who, surviving, returns to the same university to become an assistant dean. “While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.” The novel is a grand meditation on the nature of man and what makes life worthwhile. For Stoner, the world is literature and knowledge. “Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.” For him, life was also a war and one that he was gradually but perceptibly losing. He had a wife who did not love him, a daughter who grew more distant by the day, a best friend who died in his prime, a department chair who dumped upon him the worst classes every semester, and, most troubling of all, an internal emptiness that he could not escape. His old literature mentor had told Stoner, when he was deciding whether to enlist or stay on campus as a doctoral candidate, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history.”