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 a…