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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > Stoner
Stoner
by
by
Exemplary Linear Realism
John Williams' novel is neither a work of modernism, nor a work of post-modernism, despite the fact that it was first published in 1966.
At the time, one of my favourite critics, Irving Howe, published a generally favourable review in “The New Republic�, which started with the following assessment:
"The style, assumptions and matter of John Williams' 'Stoner' are at variance with those dominating current American fiction."
In effect, it’s a work of exemplary linear realism.
Sometimes it reminded me of “Madame Bovary�, in the sense that Professor William Stoner is sustained for most of his life by the concept of literature (rather than the sort of romance fiction that sustained Emma Bovary).
Other times it reminded me of the dry, but precise, fiction of Mary McCarthy (“The Groves of Academe�) and C.P. Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers� series.
Gulf State of Mind
The words "passion" and "love" are mentioned frequently throughout. Yet, the novel is curiously devoid of either.
The key word in my reading of the novel is “gܱ�.
If our lives often lack passion or love, it’s usually because we have placed a gulf between ourselves and others.
Stoner says of his mentor, Archer Sloane:
�...he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.�
Of himself, Stoner says something similar:
“He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance.�
The Mystery of the Mind and Heart
Stoner ostensibly finds a “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...�
However, he's rarely able to express it convincingly. He might believe in passion or love (within the arena of literature), but he can't seem to find a language that enables him to bridge, close or repair the gulf between himself and his wife Edith, his daughter Grace, and his work colleagues.
These key relationships in his life are almost uniformly devoid of the (positive) force of passion and love.
Yet, in summing up his own life, he declares:
“He had, in odd ways, given it 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.�
Lifelike, but Not Alive
Coming late in the book, this declaration was both odd and disingenuous, perhaps even narcissistic.
Who was it who received his gift of love or passion? Was it confined to his mind? Was its sole purpose or effect reflexive, to draw attention back to himself? (Look at me! Look at how sensitive I am! I'm alive...notwithstanding the disaster that is our relationship.)
Rarely did Stoner seem to radiate life or light. Instead, he seemed to have found himself in a cage from which he just couldn’t or wouldn't escape. Not only was he trapped, but he'd inadvertently trapped others with him as well.
It was frustrating how little attempt he made to free himself (or anybody else) from his predicament.
We learn little about the dynamic of his relationship with Edith from the dialogue. Why was it as bad as it's described? Nobody ever seems to confront the underlying problem, nobody ever seems to complain, nobody ever seems to try to remedy it.
Despite the focus on work, duties, chores and tasks, nobody makes an effort. Both spouses seem to persist with the thorn in their foot, until eventually, almost inevitably, the condition becomes hereditary and is passed on to Grace.
In contrast to F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum (that "there are no second acts in American lives)", this play, this American life, for what it’s worth, lacks a third act (which is not to say it might not be lifelike). Unfortunately, so does the sequel designed for the next generation. The Stoner family creates its own nemeses, just as it creates its own demons.
Make Thy Love More Strong
This lack of emotional intelligence is a product of what is perhaps an even greater flaw, which is adverted to in the following comment in Irving Howe’s review:
�...Mr. Williams writes with discipline and strength: he is devoted to the sentence as a form, and free from the allure of imagery. He disobeys Ford Maddox Ford’s dictum that the novelist should show rather than tell, on the assumption that to tell with enough force and intelligence is to create a mode of drama.�
Williams tells us about abstract states like passion and love (and epiphanies that paradoxically consist “of knowing something through words that could not be put in words�), but too rarely demonstrates them.
Just as Sloane asks what Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 means, we’re entitled to ask what these nouns mean to the people who use them or to whom they're supposed to apply.
Ultimately, when you finish the novel and return to the sonnet to gauge its meaning or relevance, the last two stanzas resonate:
“This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.�
This is not just advice to love somebody dearly when they are close to death, but to love them well for the duration of your relationship.
Once again, I didn’t find that Stoner ever perceived the import of these words or acted on them.
Drawing Attention to Our Own Wounds
In the end, Williams seemed to tell us too much about Stoner’s wounds and his suffering, with little else by way of relief, thus tempting us readers, not to empathise, but to experience his suffering vicariously (if we're that way inclined) or, worse still, to wallow in our own pain and self-pity. (Look at me! I'm alive! But Heaven knows I'm miserable now!)
With one exception: Stoner’s relationship with his fellow teacher, Katherine Driscoll.
She's the one ray of sunshine in the entire novel. She is a greater source of illumination than all of the books from which he is supposed to have derived strength and inspiration. If not for her, we would know little about the truth of Stoner’s capacity for passion and love ('"Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?"' - note that Katherine says, lust, not love; and learning, not teaching). She's the one person who could convince us that Stoner was ever alive in any sense beyond that of Thoreau's quiet desperation.
For these reasons, I can’t quite bring myself to add to the five star assessments of either Stoner as a character or the novel as a whole.
Four will have to suffice.
Thomas Eakin's portrait of (featured on the cover of some editions of this novel), a metaphor for intellectual solitude, doesn't reveal that he was physically violent towards the artist's sister. The suit or robes rarely maketh the man.
AN AFTERWORD:
After My Work is Done
When I read that Irving Howe and C.P. Snow had reviewed this novel positively, I inferred that it might have been one of those rare novels that rotates around the protagonist's work life.
Outside the context of Socialist Realism, we read so little about the nature of work and its role in people's lives.
Stoner comes from a farming background. In a rare moment when he has time to think, Stoner's father encourages him to go to college, so that he can be a better farmer. However, Stoner opts out after a year, when he falls under the spell of his future mentor, Sloane, who lectures young agricultural students on literature.
It's important that Stoner doesn't disclose his decision (the result of an epiphany) to his parents or relatives.
In effect, Stoner turns his back on the land, although he retains his brown skin for most of his life.
The Job of a Teacher
The life of a teacher is a relative unknown to him. I wouldn't say his mentor was a particularly good teacher. He seems only to have had one good pupil, as does Stoner himself (if you can count Katherine, who sits in on one of his classes).
The modern world needs farmers and teachers, just as it needs factory workers and musicians, and bankers and artists. Or to put it in quasi-Marxist language, it needs people to take care of both the economic base and the cultural superstructure.
I don't want to be critical of Stoner's relationship with his own parents. However, the reality is that his mother and father worked so hard, that they had little time to talk and have what middle class people would call a family life in the evening, let alone on the weekend.
Stoner turned his back on this life in favour of the life of a teacher. However, I question what he put into the life of a teacher. Did he work hard enough at his profession? How do you measure his success, except in terms of the passion and love he managed to inspire in his students? Are we to blame his students for their lack of inspiration?
In the body of my review, I commented on Stoner's lack of effort in bridging the gulf in his personal, family and work relationships.
This is the quality that most characterises the man. He wants to be a teacher, but he has never learned how to teach. He wants to be a lover, but he's never learned to love or be loved. Initially, there might have been no fault on his part. But how long are we supposed to make excuses for him? When must he accept responsibility for his own life and that of the people around him? If we make excuses for him, would we equally make excuses for ourselves?
Nowadays, we would probably say that he and Edith needed marriage counselling. It mightn't have existed during his life, but most people in those days would have sought marriage guidance from their priest. (Incidentally, I can't recall any mention of Stoner's religious belief in the novel.)
No Haven in a Heartless World
All this smacks of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. Irving Howe initially called his review "The Virtues of Failure". I suppose we can infer that he regarded Stoner as a failure, but found some virtue or heroism in his life.
I'm not sure whether we should be that generous. I question whether he embodies the culture of narcissism that Christopher Lasch would later write about in his 1979 book and in his 1977 Partisan Review article "The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time".
Ironically, Lasch's previous book (1977) was "Haven in a Heartless World", in which he focussed on "the family, particularly the attacks on the traditional bourgeois family purveyed at least since the 1920s by psychiatrists, sociologists, marriage counselors, and legal reformers."
John Williams seemed to have had all of this material in front of him, perhaps presciently. Yet, he doesn't allow his protagonist to fight his way out of his predicament.
Instead, we're supposed to feel sad or sorry for him. We're supposed to share his miserabilism.
Which is why I wonder whether we as readers are simply bridging the gulf between Stoner's world and ours via the construct of our own narcissism.
It's a tribute to the publishers that they realised that Stoner's story had become a book for our time. However, I'm not sure whether we should draw any comfort from that.
"Oh, Ken Doll, you're so sensitive! Oh, Barbie Doll, you're so evocative!"
THE SPECIAL GIFT OF LITERATURE:
"Remembering Irving Howe"
By Nina Howe
"One of my earliest and most vivid memories of my father took place on a sultry summer afternoon in the ruins of Ostia, the seaport of ancient Rome. I was about five years old and my brother, Nick, was about four. My mother was exploring the ruins and left the three of us behind under a tree. Nick and I had a wonderful time digging trenches in the dirt for our Dinky cars, while Daddy sat on a small ledge under the tree reading a book. I remember looking up and seeing him engrossed in his book. He was so much at peace as he read on this still, hot afternoon. It was one of my first memories of my father, and the book is a central theme in my image of him. I don’t know what book he was reading, and when I asked him several years ago, he no longer remembered. From this experience, I gained an appreciation that books had some kind of magical quality, that in some way they were a special gift. This is a very special gift I feel he gave to me and I know to many others as well."
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
John Williams' novel is neither a work of modernism, nor a work of post-modernism, despite the fact that it was first published in 1966.
At the time, one of my favourite critics, Irving Howe, published a generally favourable review in “The New Republic�, which started with the following assessment:
"The style, assumptions and matter of John Williams' 'Stoner' are at variance with those dominating current American fiction."
In effect, it’s a work of exemplary linear realism.
Sometimes it reminded me of “Madame Bovary�, in the sense that Professor William Stoner is sustained for most of his life by the concept of literature (rather than the sort of romance fiction that sustained Emma Bovary).
Other times it reminded me of the dry, but precise, fiction of Mary McCarthy (“The Groves of Academe�) and C.P. Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers� series.
Gulf State of Mind
The words "passion" and "love" are mentioned frequently throughout. Yet, the novel is curiously devoid of either.
The key word in my reading of the novel is “gܱ�.
If our lives often lack passion or love, it’s usually because we have placed a gulf between ourselves and others.
Stoner says of his mentor, Archer Sloane:
�...he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.�
Of himself, Stoner says something similar:
“He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance.�
The Mystery of the Mind and Heart
Stoner ostensibly finds a “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...�
However, he's rarely able to express it convincingly. He might believe in passion or love (within the arena of literature), but he can't seem to find a language that enables him to bridge, close or repair the gulf between himself and his wife Edith, his daughter Grace, and his work colleagues.
These key relationships in his life are almost uniformly devoid of the (positive) force of passion and love.
Yet, in summing up his own life, he declares:
“He had, in odd ways, given it 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.�
Lifelike, but Not Alive
Coming late in the book, this declaration was both odd and disingenuous, perhaps even narcissistic.
Who was it who received his gift of love or passion? Was it confined to his mind? Was its sole purpose or effect reflexive, to draw attention back to himself? (Look at me! Look at how sensitive I am! I'm alive...notwithstanding the disaster that is our relationship.)
Rarely did Stoner seem to radiate life or light. Instead, he seemed to have found himself in a cage from which he just couldn’t or wouldn't escape. Not only was he trapped, but he'd inadvertently trapped others with him as well.
It was frustrating how little attempt he made to free himself (or anybody else) from his predicament.
We learn little about the dynamic of his relationship with Edith from the dialogue. Why was it as bad as it's described? Nobody ever seems to confront the underlying problem, nobody ever seems to complain, nobody ever seems to try to remedy it.
Despite the focus on work, duties, chores and tasks, nobody makes an effort. Both spouses seem to persist with the thorn in their foot, until eventually, almost inevitably, the condition becomes hereditary and is passed on to Grace.
In contrast to F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum (that "there are no second acts in American lives)", this play, this American life, for what it’s worth, lacks a third act (which is not to say it might not be lifelike). Unfortunately, so does the sequel designed for the next generation. The Stoner family creates its own nemeses, just as it creates its own demons.
Make Thy Love More Strong
This lack of emotional intelligence is a product of what is perhaps an even greater flaw, which is adverted to in the following comment in Irving Howe’s review:
�...Mr. Williams writes with discipline and strength: he is devoted to the sentence as a form, and free from the allure of imagery. He disobeys Ford Maddox Ford’s dictum that the novelist should show rather than tell, on the assumption that to tell with enough force and intelligence is to create a mode of drama.�
Williams tells us about abstract states like passion and love (and epiphanies that paradoxically consist “of knowing something through words that could not be put in words�), but too rarely demonstrates them.
Just as Sloane asks what Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 means, we’re entitled to ask what these nouns mean to the people who use them or to whom they're supposed to apply.
Ultimately, when you finish the novel and return to the sonnet to gauge its meaning or relevance, the last two stanzas resonate:
“This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.�
This is not just advice to love somebody dearly when they are close to death, but to love them well for the duration of your relationship.
Once again, I didn’t find that Stoner ever perceived the import of these words or acted on them.
Drawing Attention to Our Own Wounds
In the end, Williams seemed to tell us too much about Stoner’s wounds and his suffering, with little else by way of relief, thus tempting us readers, not to empathise, but to experience his suffering vicariously (if we're that way inclined) or, worse still, to wallow in our own pain and self-pity. (Look at me! I'm alive! But Heaven knows I'm miserable now!)
With one exception: Stoner’s relationship with his fellow teacher, Katherine Driscoll.
She's the one ray of sunshine in the entire novel. She is a greater source of illumination than all of the books from which he is supposed to have derived strength and inspiration. If not for her, we would know little about the truth of Stoner’s capacity for passion and love ('"Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?"' - note that Katherine says, lust, not love; and learning, not teaching). She's the one person who could convince us that Stoner was ever alive in any sense beyond that of Thoreau's quiet desperation.
For these reasons, I can’t quite bring myself to add to the five star assessments of either Stoner as a character or the novel as a whole.
Four will have to suffice.
Thomas Eakin's portrait of (featured on the cover of some editions of this novel), a metaphor for intellectual solitude, doesn't reveal that he was physically violent towards the artist's sister. The suit or robes rarely maketh the man.
AN AFTERWORD:
After My Work is Done
When I read that Irving Howe and C.P. Snow had reviewed this novel positively, I inferred that it might have been one of those rare novels that rotates around the protagonist's work life.
Outside the context of Socialist Realism, we read so little about the nature of work and its role in people's lives.
Stoner comes from a farming background. In a rare moment when he has time to think, Stoner's father encourages him to go to college, so that he can be a better farmer. However, Stoner opts out after a year, when he falls under the spell of his future mentor, Sloane, who lectures young agricultural students on literature.
It's important that Stoner doesn't disclose his decision (the result of an epiphany) to his parents or relatives.
In effect, Stoner turns his back on the land, although he retains his brown skin for most of his life.
The Job of a Teacher
The life of a teacher is a relative unknown to him. I wouldn't say his mentor was a particularly good teacher. He seems only to have had one good pupil, as does Stoner himself (if you can count Katherine, who sits in on one of his classes).
The modern world needs farmers and teachers, just as it needs factory workers and musicians, and bankers and artists. Or to put it in quasi-Marxist language, it needs people to take care of both the economic base and the cultural superstructure.
I don't want to be critical of Stoner's relationship with his own parents. However, the reality is that his mother and father worked so hard, that they had little time to talk and have what middle class people would call a family life in the evening, let alone on the weekend.
Stoner turned his back on this life in favour of the life of a teacher. However, I question what he put into the life of a teacher. Did he work hard enough at his profession? How do you measure his success, except in terms of the passion and love he managed to inspire in his students? Are we to blame his students for their lack of inspiration?
In the body of my review, I commented on Stoner's lack of effort in bridging the gulf in his personal, family and work relationships.
This is the quality that most characterises the man. He wants to be a teacher, but he has never learned how to teach. He wants to be a lover, but he's never learned to love or be loved. Initially, there might have been no fault on his part. But how long are we supposed to make excuses for him? When must he accept responsibility for his own life and that of the people around him? If we make excuses for him, would we equally make excuses for ourselves?
Nowadays, we would probably say that he and Edith needed marriage counselling. It mightn't have existed during his life, but most people in those days would have sought marriage guidance from their priest. (Incidentally, I can't recall any mention of Stoner's religious belief in the novel.)
No Haven in a Heartless World
All this smacks of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. Irving Howe initially called his review "The Virtues of Failure". I suppose we can infer that he regarded Stoner as a failure, but found some virtue or heroism in his life.
I'm not sure whether we should be that generous. I question whether he embodies the culture of narcissism that Christopher Lasch would later write about in his 1979 book and in his 1977 Partisan Review article "The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time".
Ironically, Lasch's previous book (1977) was "Haven in a Heartless World", in which he focussed on "the family, particularly the attacks on the traditional bourgeois family purveyed at least since the 1920s by psychiatrists, sociologists, marriage counselors, and legal reformers."
John Williams seemed to have had all of this material in front of him, perhaps presciently. Yet, he doesn't allow his protagonist to fight his way out of his predicament.
Instead, we're supposed to feel sad or sorry for him. We're supposed to share his miserabilism.
Which is why I wonder whether we as readers are simply bridging the gulf between Stoner's world and ours via the construct of our own narcissism.
It's a tribute to the publishers that they realised that Stoner's story had become a book for our time. However, I'm not sure whether we should draw any comfort from that.
"Oh, Ken Doll, you're so sensitive! Oh, Barbie Doll, you're so evocative!"
THE SPECIAL GIFT OF LITERATURE:
"Remembering Irving Howe"
By Nina Howe
"One of my earliest and most vivid memories of my father took place on a sultry summer afternoon in the ruins of Ostia, the seaport of ancient Rome. I was about five years old and my brother, Nick, was about four. My mother was exploring the ruins and left the three of us behind under a tree. Nick and I had a wonderful time digging trenches in the dirt for our Dinky cars, while Daddy sat on a small ledge under the tree reading a book. I remember looking up and seeing him engrossed in his book. He was so much at peace as he read on this still, hot afternoon. It was one of my first memories of my father, and the book is a central theme in my image of him. I don’t know what book he was reading, and when I asked him several years ago, he no longer remembered. From this experience, I gained an appreciation that books had some kind of magical quality, that in some way they were a special gift. This is a very special gift I feel he gave to me and I know to many others as well."
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
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Reading Progress
September 21, 2014
– Shelved
September 21, 2014
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January 15, 2016
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Started Reading
January 16, 2016
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January 16, 2016
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January 16, 2016
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January 17, 2016
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Finished Reading
February 11, 2022
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rated it 2 stars
Jan 17, 2016 09:25AM
Your review perfectly encapsulates one of the things I found bothersome about Stoner. There is a gulf between what's claimed as passion and what actually exists. It's as if Williams did not realize that he had created a character without passion.
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Thanks, Will. If asked, we'd probably all say we're passionate and loving. The question is, however, how we demonstrate it, so that others can appreciate it. A book or a poem is a very controlled environment.
Hat is off. Not sure how you cobble together such big, good reviews. Insightful.
Thanks, Christopher. They often start with just a few ideas in my head that I flesh out in order to help somebody else understand what was going on in my head. They also help me to remember what I was thinking on the journey through the book. Sometimes you want to remember how you felt at the time.
Very interesting review. Lots to ponder.
Another great review, Ian. I found this book an outstanding but unremittingly depressing read. It made Madame Bovary seem positively light-hearted! The only other book I've ever read that left me this depressed was Play it As It Lays). Your comparison to Snow is also interesting-it seems to me the tone is similar (I'd forgotten my I-love-C.P.Snow era). So many thought-provoking points (I wonder if the "gulfs" are what make it difficult to respond emotionally to this work).I actually didn't judge Stoner, he's like some character out of Thomas Hardy, a product of nature, inexpressive and suffering without words. Which is pretty funny for an English teacher.
I forgive him his failure as a teacher but where is the passion for language? It's difficult to really believe in his epiphany when it's as flattened as the rest of his life (and affect). I did appreciate Katherine's presence in the novel-some life at least. I sincerely doubt, however, that marriage counselling would help Stoner. You sort of have to talk and feel for that to work. At least I think so.
So I admired the writing but felt the book just sucked the life out of me. It's all, life is meaningless and then it's gone (with Katherine as a little hope thrown in, just to be withdrawn).
Writing this, I realize that Stoner actually made me a little angry. But then that anger is sucked into a larger "What's the point?" that I find the prevailing note of the work.
God, you're so right, Ian. That lack of passion truly is a weakness. I think I labelled it passivity, but your way of articulating it is better. Excellent review, as always -- thorough, thoughtful, and wonderfully well-written!
Exceptional review. I wrote a review of this one and focused on his family life (or, more accurately, his lack of family life). Can you imagine being relegated to the parlor couch as a man in your early 30s!!?
Ellie wrote: "Another great review, Ian. I found this book an outstanding but unremittingly depressing read."Thanks, Ellie. I suspect Williams might have been suggesting a distinction between "what does it mean" and "how did it make you feel", as if you can have one without the other. However, if we only feel something when we read (words), but can't put our feelings or response into words, then our feelings would presumably remain in our head. In other words, we would head down the road towards solipsism. I have to ask, what good is it to have feelings if you can't share them with them, whether by words or some other vehicle (e.g., art, music). Stoner didn't seem to have the words or any other form of creativity that enabled him to bridge the gap and share.
There's a limit to how much empathy I can devote to somebody who won't try to help themselves. Self-help is preferable to external help, unless we're socially or personally disadvantaged for some reason. (I don't put English professors in this last category.)
I had a CP Snow period as well, when I was trying to bridge the gulf between the in my own life.
Steve wrote: "God, you're so right, Ian. That lack of passion truly is a weakness. I think I labelled it passivity, but your way of articulating it is better. Excellent review, as always -- thorough, thoughtful,..."Thanks, Steve. You make an interesting point about passivity. Maybe under the veil of passivity there is a lot going on, but how would anybody else know, unless the person communicates somehow? Given this is a verbal arena (as opposed to art or music), surely words would be a tool of communication with which they're comfortable. Is literature something that doesn't require communication?
Glenn wrote: "Exceptional review. I wrote a review of this one and focused on his family life (or, more accurately, his lack of family life). Can you imagine being relegated to the parlor couch as a man in your in your early 30s!!? "Thanks, Glenn. Re-reading your review, and your comment about Grace's escape, you made me wonder whether Stoner's love of literature was a form of "escape" that left him caged in his inability to bridge the gulf. Thus, it remained a solitary comfort, akin to the intellectual solitude of Thomas Eakin's portrait.
Ian wrote: "Glenn wrote: "Exceptional review. I wrote a review of this one and focused on his family life (or, more accurately, his lack of family life). Can you imagine being relegated to the parlor couch as ..."Many academics retreat into their world of specialized scholarship, certainly this is the case for William Stoner. In some important ways, that world where intellectual understanding is king is much less challenging than dealing with one's emotions and relationship with other people.
"He wants to be a teacher, but he has never learned how to teach. He wants to be a lover, but he's never learned to love or be loved." I think this pretty much sums it up; though I think he was, for lack of a better word, a recluse, because he didn't really have company for the longest time. That's got to make life hard.Considering Stoner is my new favourite, for the time being at least, what better way to extend a hand of friendship?
Your reviews are always exceptional and includes breathtaking partions. Thanks🙏🏽
Excellent review. Agree, maybe with one difference, that my personal reaction. I felt no sorrow for Stoner for all the reasons you say. In fact, I don't like him at all. Why should anyone? He is totally responsible for his life, and beyond that he infects others. The only thing I might modify that with is a question regarding abilities; i.e. is an incompetent deserving of continual help when it would appear as if they're doing their darndest to be incompetent every chance they get?
Great review Ian, really well written. I read the book last year and it became one of my favorites for how much it made me feel, mostly sadness and melancholy like others have said. I didn’t think of narcissism or how Stoner was responsible for the way his life was going, your review made me reflect about those things in myself and now I want to read the book again with the points you brought up in mind.
Very apt review. I need time to take stock of the contents. At any rate, I consider reading this book a priority. Thanks for your dedication.
One of those rare instances where I liked a novel the 2nd time around as much as I did the first time I read it [17 years ago to this exact day and then I gave it an a+++].
