William Stoner lives a quiet life. After his death, he’s hardly remembered; during his life, he moves from his family’s farm to the University of Missouri, where he becomes a teacher. He falls in love with literature and teaching, but never rises above the rank of an assistant professor; he marries, almost hastily, only to find the love that could’ve been. He lives a mediocre life and dies a mediocre death.
Yet John Williams writes Stoner’s life in such a profound, moving way. In just under 300 pages, he delivered a masterpiece brimming with the themes of life, death, failure, relationships, integrity, and, most of all, love. Stoner is a powerful, bittersweet exploration of love.
“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
John Williams in Stoner
“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
There is love for a person, and there is love for a way of life. From the outside perspective, Stoner’s life may be devastating. Yet he had experienced love three times: one fueled by one-sided passion, one a reminder of what could’ve been, and finally, one for his job. He finds solace and a never-ending passion in literature.
Stoner is a quiet yet intense character. He treats life with stoicism and a certain humility; he welcomes his failures with open arms, like things predetermined by life; he doesn’t fight what life has in store for him. Instead, he learns from it. He follows his integrity to the very end.
In the end, he knows that his life’s work is useless. But to him, it’s a symbol of his accomplishments, his defeats, his victories. They’ll never be recorded in history, but he understands the significance of his life. Stoner is a powerful reminder of individual life, a reclamation of the significance and gift of each.
“He had, in odd ways, given [love] to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”
John Williams in Stoner
~ 5 stars.
