A Painful Good Book

            William Stoner teaches for his whole career at a Midwestern college where he went to school and where he met his first love: English literature. He lives and dies there, and is forgotten. John Williams informs us of these facts at the beginning of the novel in a kind of dare. Why would we continue reading it?

            One answer is that Williams writes compelling prose that makes us continue. Critics describe it as “precise” and “lucid”—singling out its clarity and sparseness, with no words wasted. They also talk about his style as being “assured” or “authoritative.”

            Another reason is that Stoner is a tragic hero who survives despite formidable opposition from those closest to him. His wife Edith (her “moral training,” the narrator tell us, was “negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual”) is neurotic—an earlier generation would call her a hysteric. She hates Stoner and punishes him more ingeniously than does his department chairman, who also hates him, apparently because the chairman recognizes in Stoner an integrity that shames him, in the way that Shakespeare has Iago say that Cassio “hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.”

            Williams thinks Stoner is a hero, and so do I. The book is Stoner (1965).