A person recommended this novel to me and I read it. Despite the title, it’s nothing at all like Dazed and Confused. Except for being a heartfelt, quotable, work of art capturing certain time-bound aspects of middle America during the twentieth century—but no similarities in themes, characters, plot, or sensibility.

Associations

You know how sometimes after you’ve read a book you associate it with the chair you were sitting in when you were reading it, or the chips you were snacking on at the time, or some other experiential thing? In this case, the two most relevant aspects to me will be completely irrelevant to you: the person who recommended the book to me and the language I read it in. Stoner was the first book I’ve read in English in the past few weeks. Don’t get me wrong—I’m still reading lots of stuff in English, not even counting almost everything I read on the internet—it’s just that I’ve been using my fiction reading to work on my French. Which is still pretty bad. So when I read a book in English, it’s kinda stunning how fast it goes and how I can actually follow everything that’s happening. I was trying to imagine what it would’ve been like to have read Stoner in translation. My guess is I would’ve followed the general plot and the main themes for sure, and I think I would’ve had a sense of all the characters, but I would’ve missed some of the details of the plot, and especially I wouldn’t’ve caught the many quotable lines, the bits where the author inserts some general statements about life. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to mark or otherwise note these passages and I don’t have the energy to find them now, but you can take my word that if you read this book in your native language you’ll find some pleasantly deep thoughts. Indeed, one of the charms of Stoner is that it’s written in an old-fashioned third person, without the full rigor of point of view that you’d get from a modern writer such as Richard Ford, but this relaxedness has its compensations.

Stoner is similar to what other books by other authors?

This paperback reprint copy of Stoner is full of over-the-top blurbs, which set me up to love the book but also kinda made me want to hate it. I ended up liking the book, but before getting to the ups and downs that got me there, let me talk about comparisons, as one thing about reading all those blurbs was that it got me wondering what other books or stories were like it.

My first comparison point was the now-forgotten but once very popular John P. Marquand. (When I’m talking about Marquand, I exclude the way overrated The Late George Apley. I’m talking about real Marquand books like Point of No Return, Wickford Point, etc.) Marquand was the poet laureate of mid-twentieth-century American professional Wasps looking back at their lives and tracing their choices and regrets, which pretty much describes Stoner. The style is different though, as John Williams (the author of Stoner) plays it straight, with the only humor coming from the main character’s bemused take on human follies, whereas Marquand is ironic all the way to his chapter titles. I’m not saying this makes Marquand better than Williams—or vice versa—just that they present very similar themes and plots but with much different sensibilities. I like them both.

My next midcentury comparison point was John O’Hara—like Marquand, a bit older than Williams, but then again Williams has an old-fashioned aura. O’Hara was another “social novelist,” and Stoner does, among other things, present a core sample of part of American society. I guess at this point you might ask why I don’t compare to John Updike: I guess it’s because, while O’Hara and Willams do write about changes in the world, I think of both of them more as capturing some particular aspect of society in amber, whereas Updike, like Philip Roth and others of that era, seem ultimately to be writing about change: change is their topic, in a way that I wouldn’t say is the case with Marquand, O’Hara, or Williams. In any case, I don’t think the O’Hara comparison is so close, because Williams really gets inside his characters in a way that O’Hara doesn’t really try to do. Again, this is no criticism of O’Hara—a feeling of objectivity is part of what he’s going for, just as his follower George V. Higgins did, decades later—; he and Williams are doing different things.

In any case, I finally thought of the perfect comparison: Forlesen. Same general characters, same themes, same adulthood-to-grave plot, same sensibility where the main character finds himself in a world he doesn’t full understand and resignedly accepts the absurdities around him while trying to find meaning in the life that he’s given. OK, not identical: Stoner is a full novel and Forlesen is a short story; Stoner is full of realistic detail and Forlesen is written in the form of a dream or fantasy; still, I was struck by the similarities. Maybe no coincidence: Forlesen came out a few years after Stoner, and maybe Wolfe had read that earlier book. I don’t know. I googled various combinations of Forlesen, Stoner, John Willams, and Gene Wolfe and didn’t find any matches, not even anyone commenting on the similarities of the two stories. Another similarity is that Stoner and Forlesen both feel like masterpieces, or maybe one would say, “minor masterpieces” or “tours de force.” They just give an air of perfection, even though they’re not perfect at all, they’re just human products, but when I read Forlesen and there were parts of it that I didn’t understand, I just felt that this was my failing, that it all fit together in a deep way, and similarly with Stoner. Again, I’m not saying that either of these works of literature is perfect, just that each of them is written in a “this is perfect,” self-contained style. Unlike for example Martin Amis or, to bring him up again, John Updike, each of which in his own way has a sprawling style where you’re happy to feel that that he threw in some extra stuff because he wasn’t exactly sure what would work.

Not a campus novel, as that term is usually understood

Here’s one more set of comparisons, that, interestingly, doesn’t work so well, and that’s to other campus novel. Stoner is definitely a campus novel, as it takes place almost entirely at a university, most of its characters are connected in some way to the university, and lots of its plot involves campus themes such teaching and university politics. But just about every other campus novel I’ve read is a comedy. Maybe a dark comedy, but still fundamentally ironic. Mary McCarthy, David Lodge, James Lasdun, you name it, they play the academic struggles for laughs. And that’s not even getting to the ha-ha, murder-on-campus, why-was-the-department-chair-found-with-a-knife-in-his-back satirical mystery novels. In contrast, Williams plays it straight. Yes, there’s humor, and the main character perceives the absurdities of it all, but ultimately the academic aspects of the novel reflect a view of teaching and research as noble pursuits, with a respect for the people who do these jobs seriously. Even the academic administrators are given respect for doing a difficult job the best they can. So I don’t think Stoner fits into the usual campus novel tradition.

The one thing that I don’t think worked so well in the book was the specifics of the academic interest. Stoner’s passion is not science or sports or Shakespeare or anything even vaguely accessible to me, or I’d guess most readers. It’s medieval literature, actually the connection between Latin grammar and medieval literature, or something like that. Within the context of the novel, this worked: I found it believable that William Stoner, the character, was entranced by the topic and that he could on occasion inspire students as well—but Williams was not able to convey this in a “show, don’t tell” fashion: I never got any sense of what about Latin grammar and medieval literature was so life-changing to Stoner. I have no doubt that some scholars really are excited by that topic, but it seemed like a weakness of the book that this central motor of plot and character never came alive. It would be as if there was a book all about football but with no actual football scenes.

That’s not really the biggest deal, though, as the book was mostly about the protagonist’s decades-long struggle to understand himself and the world. Remember Baldanders in the Book of the New Sun, who was a kind of inverse of a self-experimenter: rather than experimenting on himself to understand the world, he experimented on the world to understand himself? William Stoner was kind of like that: he’s a self-effacing man who does his duties as he sees them, but ultimately I see him as a kind of solipsist, with the fundamental plot of the book being his gradually increasing understanding of himself.

The academic politics are realistic.

Interestingly enough, even though—or perhaps because—Stoner is not a traditional campus novel, its descriptions of academic politics seemed realistic to me:

– The nightmarish feeling where you’re just doing your thing and all of a sudden it turns out that you’re in the way of someone else’s power play.

– Being assigned to teach night classes as a form of retaliation.

– Having someone who works down the hall but doesn’t say a word to you for years.

– The dismaying feeling sometimes that you’re playing checkers and they’re playing chess. And other times the amused feeling that they’re making a spiderweb of plans but you don’t care at all.

Sometimes you can just do your teaching and research and not get tangled in other people’s silly games and empire building; sometimes you can’t avoid it.

How I felt about Stoner, and William Stoner, during my reading

OK, now on to my reactions while reading the book. I started off being impressed: the topic of the book sounds boring, and the topic of the beginning chapters—farm boy goes off to a small college in 1910 and discovers a love of book learning—seems particularly dry—but it was readable! To squeeze this level of narrative juice from such a stone, that’s an impressive achievement.

Then when I got past the middle of the book and came to all of William Stoner’s disappointments, I started to get annoyed: the character is so passive, he’s a doormat, he just sits around being a victim and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him! I decided that William Stoner is, to use an anachronistic term, passive-aggressive, invariably doing the things that will annoy people the most and then acting as if he has no agency. How irritating! I mean, sure, sometimes it’s interesting to read a book about an unappealing character, but here I felt he was supposed to be the hero. It would be as if someone gave me a biography of Alexander the Great and I’m supposed to be cheering him on as he goes around starting wars and slaughtering people.

But then I kept reading and I get a sense of where the character is coming from, that these disappointments are just part of his life, they don’t define his life. Also, the plot is clean enough that you can see the logical rationale for why he doesn’t get divorced or take other steps that, from the outside, would seem natural.

Finally, upon reflection I realized that William Stoner did have agency: he wasn’t entirely passive. He made some big decisions, most notably not to go back to the farm and not to go fight in World War 1. It was made clear in the book that these were decisions he made, and made me think of the idea that appears in some time-travel-related science fiction, that most of our apparent decisions are deterministic (we think we’re deciding what to do but our brains have already made the decisions for us, as it were, with our executive function or homunculus then believing the fiction that it is in charge), but that occasionally there are these pivot points where history could go in more than one way. Reading Stoner, I get the feeling that he could’ve gone back to the farm, and later he could have enlisted, and the character made deliberate decisions not to. In contrast, other important aspects of his life such as his marriage and much of his career just happened, and he either acquiesced with the flow or recognized in some meta-fictional sense that these were not his decisions to make.

So in that way the book is kinda modern, or post-modern—I can never quite tell the difference between those terms—despite being written in a straight-up realist style.

The female characters

The most striking flaw of the book—other than the author’s inability (as I see it) to bring to life the protagonist’s love for Latin grammar and medieval literature—is in the presentation of the two main female characters, one of whom is close to all bad (excused possibly only by her weakness) and other who is, as far as we can see, absolutely perfect. On the other hand, we interpret this not as the author’s perspective at all but rather an description of the protagonist’s narrow understanding of the opposite sex, with the representation of these two love interests showing his own inability to get into these other people’s heads. From that perspective, it is William Stoner, not John Williams, who is able to see men as complex three-dimensional entities but can only understand women as idealizations. I can’t really figure out how to tell this apart—in statistical terms, the information given in the book cannot “identify” how much of this perspective is coming from the author and how much from the character—but, if we really want to get post-modern (or modern) about it, that’s itself one of the shimmering ambiguities that gives this apparently so-straightforward book some of its interest.

In summary

As with Nassim Taleb’s books, Stoner gave me a lot to think about. It’s not my job to “review” Stoner or to tell you “how good it is” or to give it some number of “stars” or to give you my take on the author’s sexism or lack thereof. Really it’s one of the pleasant aspects of blogging, as compared to standard journalism, that I don’t need to wrap things up at the end with some final assessment. I recommend you read Stoner, and something by Marquand (but not The Late George Apley, please), and Forlesen. And, if you’re like me, this will stimulate a lot of thoughts.