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I asked my daughter if me and her and her mother were in a hot air balloon and it was about to crash into the ocean who would you throw out to keep the balloon aloft, me or your mother? She said she’d throw me out. I said Why? She said Because you’re bigger than her. So I said okay, imagine that me and your mother weigh exactly the same, then who would you throw out? She said she’d throw me out. I said why? She said because you’re older, so you’ve had your fun. So I said okay, imagine that me and your mother weigh the same and we’re exactly the same age, now who would you throw out? She said she’d throw me out. I asked why? She said because you keep asking all these stupid questions. So I gave up on that line of enquiry and read Stoner, a much loved novel.

It’s about this teacher. Boy, do people like to wax sentimental about teachers. There’s Mr Chips in Goodbye Mr Chips and there’s John Keating in Dead Poets Society and that’s just off the top of my head. William Stoner in this sorry tale is a Missouri farm boy who goes to university to study agriculture then gets smacked upside his head by one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and never looks back. He becomes a worshipper at the shrine of literature, with a capital L and becomes a teacher of it.

This is the kind of study of Literature where a student will announce

I intend to trace Shelley’s first rejection of Godwinian necessitarianism for a more or less Platonic ideal through the mature use of that ideal as a comprehensive synthesis of his earlier atheism, radicalism, Christianity and scientific necessitarianism

You at the back wake up! I’m not even half way done with this damned review. Well, university English departments did and maybe still do crank out students who write this sort of abstruse shite and it’s all just as useful as the great theological treatises about the nature of the Logos in St John’s left earhole or whether it was 5000 herrings or 5000 cod in the feeding of the 5000. What a colossal waste of time.

HE FELT AT TIMES THAT HE WAS A KIND OF VEGETABLE
(p. 184)

Yes, I could not but agree, possibly a leek or a radish or a turnip or a mangel wurzel. Stoner is exactly what a vegetable would be if a vegetable could be a junior professor in English at the University of Missouri. He plods dully through his life in a very vegetably way. He sees a pretty girl at the age of around 25, having apparently never seen one before, and thinks “I…will…marry…that�� and does so. This turns out to be a giant MISTAKE.

Like Smokey Robinson said in 1961

Gotta get yourself a bargain son
Don't be sold on the very first one
Pretty girls come a dime a dozen
Try to find one who's gonna give ya true lovin'
Before you take a girl and say I do now
Make sure she's in love with you now
My mama told me
You better shop around

In all fairness, William’s mother never gave him this advice as she was still down on the farm rassling with the piglets. Edith, the bride, turns out to be the very dictionary definition of damaged goods. Some readers think she’s simply bonkers but John Williams puts in a scene which clearly shows where her fear and hatred of men has come from, and it was all very sadly believable.
So poor old Bill. He’s married a cross between Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest and Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. No bunnies are harmed during this novel, it is true, but there is a strong suggestion that Edith would have boiled up a dozen if only she’d have thought of it.
Oh and then Bill Stoner gets embroiled in a ridiculous trench war in the English department, the upshot of which is that now his boss also hates him and spends 25 years making sure his professional life is a misery.

What a pickle! Hated by wife and boss! Onward plods the vegetable, through the rest of his painful life.



For the first half I had to agree with the vast majority of 4 & 5 starrers of Stoner. It was weirdly compelling. It was boring but kinda hypnotic, like Donna Tartt’s Secret History. It was boring in an interesting way. But jeez, then it all becomes a little too much. If it’s a plot spoiler I will say that for 30 pages or so our Bill is actually HAPPY! But you know and I know that won’t last and we’ll be back to stoically enduring and gritting teeth and shoulder to the wheel. So the stars began to fade away and by the last page Stoner was very lucky to hang on to his third star.