Stoner, and Middle American Victimhood

Who is the victim in John Williams' Stoner?

CW: Stoner includes sexual assault, and reviews/recommendations of this book may want to include warnings so that folks can avoid it if they wish.

There are many reviews of John Williams’ Stoner (1965) around the internet. Nearly 200,000 ratings on Goodreads alone. It was one of those books I’d been intending to read, and Ellen Yang’s review gave me the final push I needed to pick it up. Yang writes of the beauty of the first first seventy or so pages of the book, and it’s strong opening. The novel begins with William Stoner’s stoic farmer father suggesting Stoner go to a local college to learn about agriculture. Stoner’s parents lead ordinary lives with low expectations. Stoner believed his fate to be similar, until he unexpectedly falls in love with literature during his required sophomore English class. This is the part that the positive, glowing reviews seem to focus on: the love of literature, and the idea of literature as a savior of an ordinary or failure of a life. That love and mentorship of an older professor put Stoner on the path to becoming an instructor, so he tells his parents he won’t return to the farm on his graduation day, and they quietly, gracefully accept that their hard work to pass down a farm to their only son was for naught. His life in further enriched as he meets two friends, the sharp, witty Dave Masters, and Charles Finch. Dave Masters dies young, and serves a regret and inspiration for Stoner. Finch is another device, protecting Stoner in his teaching position. Williams tells us this is an ordinary life, and that Stoner will be forgotten by his final classes of students, unknown to most people on Earth, the book he’s succeeding in having published will be forgotten by readers. Yet, it’s also a privileged life: although he does not achieve lasting fame or notoriety - but how very, very few of us do or will - he had an extraordinary opportunity in finding something he loved, making a career of it, becoming a published author, and he later achieves all of the goals of middle class: becomes an assistant professor, marries, has a child, falls in love, purchases a home, and finds lifelong friendship. White working class middle Americans are suffering. A working class/blue collar job no longer guarantees the ease promised and given to the the baby boomer generation by the greatest generation, as a working class job in the rust belt, nor anywhere else, can no longer guarantee home ownership, college savings for their kids, or daily meat on the table, and friendships and relationships are becoming increasing more rare, with predictions that roughly one-third of millennials will never marry, and roughly one-quarter of Americans consider themselves friendless. The book is set a generation before Williams’, Stoner would have been born in the late 1890s and died in the early-mid 1960s, and perhaps for that era his achievements were ordinary or even a failure, but those achievements are out of reach for many today.

Further, to suggest that the blame for some of Stoner’s ordinariness/failure is caused by women or disabled rather than self and the powers that be, as this book does, is inherently false and dangerously divisive. To make the very few minorities: one of only a handful of women, the one that appears the most frequently, as well as the only two disabled characters in his book Stoner’s enemies are too obvious and too easy. The two disabled characters, Holly Lomax, a “distorted” version of Dave Masters, the distortion represented crudely and obviously through his physical impairment, and Lomax’s protege, Charles Walker, are Stoner’s professional enemies. Lomax is an intelligent, sarcastic man, an outsider of sorts. There’s a lengthy, bitter speech in which he tells Stoner that there’s no end to the depth of hate he feels for Stoner because he thinks Stoner is prejudiced against disabled folks. It’s presented as a baseless accusation and Lomax leaning into a false victimhood. Is it? Stoner targets Walker, not wanting Walker in his class, singling Walker out when he shows up late for class (his disability affects one of his legs), but Williams tells us the targeting is because Walker is an outsider in the university and lacks the merit to be a PhD or to teach. Stoner is certain that Walker is a sort of affirmative action hire, and Stoner is one of the few characters to see through the ruse. It seems very in-line with current rhetoric against “wokeness”. It’s also out of character: Stoner doesn’t fight back against anything else, not even for the love of his only child (see last photo at end of this post), in the way he fights against Walker. It adds some drama to the Stoner’s ordinary life, but the drama isn’t consistent with the rest of the story, but feels placed to push an agenda of ordinary Middle Americanness, and the threat of colleges being taken over by undesirables.

Edith, the woman Stoner marries, is central villain of Stoner’s life, and one of the interesting, compelling characters in his book. Stoner believes she hates him. She prevents him from finishing his second novel, the one he’d started working on until she kicked him out of his study and toward his cramped university office. When that wasn’t enough, she drives wedges between Stoner and their only child. What Williams fails to show the reader Edith’s perspective, her entrapment as a pre-midcentury middle class woman, that her only realistic choice was marriage, and once she was married, her life was limited to her home and role of housekeeper, wife, and mother. Before marriage, she’s a beautiful, sheltered, somewhat fragile young woman, and even after, she shows some desire for more than what life’s given her, sometimes experimenting with making music, painting, finally settling on sculpture, and only desiring sex when she wants to become a mother. Because under ordinary circumstances, she does not want to have sex with her new husband. Williams implies she’s against sex, but perhaps giving her more than two days after marriage might have warmed her up the idea. Stoner talks to her, then pushes himself onto her as “she turned her head sharply and lifted her arm to cover her face” (p71). And then he continues to force himself on her, often when she’s still asleep. “If she was sufficiently roused from her sleep she tensed and stiffened, turning her head sideways in a familiar gesture and burying it in her pillow, enduring violation, at such times Stoner performed his love [italics mine] as quickly as he could, hating himself for his haste and regretting his passion (p 74 - 75). In this passage, Williams tells the reader that Stoner is to be pitied in for having a wife who cannot sexually accommodate his desire, that forced sex is a husband’s attempt at love. Afterward, Williams continually tells the reader of Stoner’s ordinary good-ole-boyness. Several men and women who negatively reviewed this book on Goodreads said they were confused about Edith’s sudden hatred of her husband and felt it was a great weakness of the novel. In a post-#metoo era, post-martial-rape-being-a-crime-era, her hate isn’t so confusing, nor is it a weakness of the novel. She’s subjected to forced sex repeatedly by her husband. It’s simply written so obliquely that it’s difficult to read it as assault or force. In a scene following her father’s death and funeral, she deliberately obliterates all childhood objects he’s gifted to her, and comes back to Stoner a changed woman. What we know of the type of distress and trauma that survivors endure explains some of Edith’s hatred, and today, psychologists believe that the trauma of sexual assault is far more devastating on the survivor’s psyche than combat.

Outside of literature, Stoner has one great love: Katherine Driscoll, beautiful, slender-as-a-willow twenty-eight year old teacher-student who lusts after large, paunchy forty-two year assistant professor while she’s enrolled in his seminar (the same seminar in which he repeatedly attacks Walker). He looks up her address, shows up at her door, they spend more time together, eventually they fall in love and have sex. The sex becomes more frequent, it turns into a full-blown affair. “‘Lust and learning,’ Katherine once said. ‘That’s really all there is, isn’t it?’” In this novel, yes, as the strengths and the focus of the positive reviews are Williams’ description of the love of literature and Stoner finding love. Even when Stoner’s wife finds out, he seems to not care for her pain or humiliation. When the affairs ends, he even confirms the affair and tells his wife her name, and in return, Edith cruelly laughs at the triteness of it all, an older assistant professor finding love with a younger coed, and Stoner realizes how it must appear to an outsider. Outside of lust, Williams never reveals why Katherine, an unmarried women in 1930s South, would risk her reputation on an affair with an older married professor. Seemingly she never believed he’d leave his wife, and when he ends the affair, she gracefully accepts without complaint, has sex with him one last time, then moves to the East Coast for an academic career, never marries, and dedicates her first published book to him. Williams created her a stock character, Stoner’s perfect love, with no backstory, a vague future, and little agency.

A more sophisticated author might have drawn more sophisticated characters rather than the sort of black-and-white, told-not-shown characters of this book, and that writer might have shown the reader how the Stoner’s choices led him to his life throughout the novel. Williams repeatedly pulls at the heartstrings when it comes to his main character, often blaming Stoner’s old awkward farm-boy nature, presenting his stoic do-nothing acceptance as heroic. Only upon Stoner’s deathbed Stoner admits to himself that much of his “failure” is because of his decisions as much as it to circumstance, an abrupt change in tone from the previous 268 pages of this 278 page book. He was an “indifferent” teacher (p 275), he contributed if not caused the failure of his marriage, he chose to let Katherine Driscoll, his one true love, go rather than face consequences and the scandal that could mean being together in a damaged relationship. Contrast this outcome with another midcentury novel with even greater potential for scandal: Patricia Highsmith’s Carol. In the end, Stoner holds his truest love, a book, “until the old excitement that was like terror fixed him where he lay” as he slips from the mortal coil.

Of the books I’ve finished this year - and we’re almost at the end - at the rate I read (about 4 or 5 books a week), this was the book I liked the least. I understand that for some readers, content and values a book espouses should be disregarded in the name of art/prose. I felt this book was a bit lacking in prose, as it (IMO) tells the reader how to feel rather than show them something and allow the reader to reach their own conclusions. I am a person for whom the values the art espouses makes a difference in my appreciation of the book, and so, the casual justification of marital rape (blame the victim, repeatedly declare the innocent confused loving-kindness of the poor rapist, who just needs to be loved in return and doesn’t understand why the person he harmed hates him so) and the outright prejudice against the disabled made this book an unpleasant read. The book was published in 1965, the first anti-marital rape laws were passed in the mid-1970s, and I read it 50 years later. For a more balanced, more shown than told view on sexual abuse in a relationship, there’s Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall (1982), or a novel many readers, including myself, consider one of the best of in English language: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Stoner is the only book I’ve finished in 2024 but would rather not keep on my shelves. Many believe Stoner is be autobiographical. If so, yikes.