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3.5 stars.
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Megaspoilers within.
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Summary: Remains of the Day meets (un)Lucky Jim meets Death of Virgil in early 20thC Midwest USA.


The trouble with Stoner is the trouble that comes with having a meek guy as your hero. The story has no heroic pull, the focus is pathos, the story literally (tautologically) pathetic. Its hard to make your saddo likeable, and to make your story little more than a downer register of their failed exploits, which as knig writes in her review merely makes you want to scream at the page for the dude to get a life.

Reading through Stoner I thought Thoreau's dictum that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation" applied . Nowadays this desperation is given a new cognomen ( we seem to call the encounter with the realisation of its presence, the persistence of this realisation as “depression�), or it is just evaded, brushed under the carpet and/or sublimated through career climbing, leisure choices, misdirection of effort etc. At first I thought the utterance found currency and literary expression with the life of William Stoner, Prufrock in person. I realised later that its more subtle. Stoner is not desperate every day. His despair never reforms his life: he's the epitome of a guy who coasts through life. When the going gets tough Stoner slinks away. He's no hero, he's a lumpen, a neb, a nothing destined - as the book says on the first page - to be forgotten soon after death. Damnatio memorae by simple action of Time comes to all of us one day but Williams insists on Stoner's peripherality right from the start. Dramatic irony or wot? In such a way does start his trying to tug at the heartstrings. Boo-hoo-de-hoo.
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The backdrop to all this Remains of the Day-esque saditude is the early-to-mid 20thC world of the Midwest, where social mobility, economic opportunity lets Stoner, a child of hardscrabble gruff farmers, go to University to study Soil Science. Along the way he discovers through a good tutor (a bit like Dead Poets Society really) a love of Books. Whoop. So he switches to Books and not soil and his pursed mouth parents noddingly accept it, as they accept his whirlwind marriage to utter nutjob, mayor of crazy town frigid f**ked up Edith, after an equally whirlwind romance (all of about two weeks: the embodiment of "marry in haste.") So too they accept the daughter whom their poisonous relationship births and Larkin-like, fucks up utterly.

It's not at all Sylvannian Familes here, as the kid grows up to be well, shall we say a bit loose, or "easy": Williams hinting like she's been pulling the train for most of the Varsity football team or something, probably the baseball and wrestling team and the coaches too. In fact it sounds like she is the town bicycle, and thus, naturlich, she ends up knocked up. Shock of the century. Social mores demand she marries the father, but he dies in WW2 on some Japanese beach after enlisting to get away from her and the embarassing squalling pooping legacy of his turn with Grace, Stoners daughter. Boo hoo.
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The economic data show us that Grace would eventually grow up to enjoy double the wealth and prosperity of Willy, which gains - according to certain figures, chief among them, economist Robert Gordon who Cassandra-like tells us we're all economically going to die - are actually now subject to slowdown, cessation and stagnation (but that's another story.) It's Willy Stoner's generation who'll help get her there, but not Willy himself, nor his colleagues. No sir. Though the world may change around him, Stoner is not part of it: he’s firmly and knowingly ensconced in his ivory tower. Later in the story, he doesn't want to allow a douchey ignorant faker grad student to continue their studies because said student represents the cracking of the tower bulwark. This section, especially the student viva versus the profs was good as the grad student tries desperately to BS through questions Stoner puts to him. Anyway, the tower's a position I can see the appeal of, but am unsure I can endorse (of this more later).

Being set in such a place, the whole book works contra to the familiar American Dream (a term that emerged mid-Stoner in 1931): Stoner is happy to operate outside the bounds of self betterment. Only the steady state universe of academia sustains him, plus an assortment of severely unexpressed or rarely experienced emotions, chiefly Love.

Thus, propitiously, to add to the personal vendetta that comes from the whole “don’t let the pleb in� argument comes more heartstring twanging: a scandal about A Girl. The requisite comely, intelligent doe eyed coed hottie, probably being played in a film version by Anne Hathaway or (opting for more 1940s heaving sweatered-bosoms by, I dunno, that Christina Hendricks woman maybe, but I am not best placed to suggest as I don't watch TV,) comes into his grad seminar one day and Good God proves she has a first class mind and so she and Stone grow closer, mutual attraction blossoms furtively until, as a middle age Prof, he's given the chance to do a Good Will Hunting and "go see about a girl". Happily its sans a mawkish Robin Williams smug-mug grinning into the cinematic cut like some dewy eyed fool in that own inimitable Williams Way, the same expression used in everything he’s ever done frankly except maybe "1Hour Photo" of course and - what the hell HAPPENED to Williams anyway? I still maintain "What Dreams May Come" is a good film at root, if only because it bucked a trend to film on Fujifilm, the end result consequently gorgeous, and I'd argue that just like Heaven's Gate, it deserves both re-engagement and re-framing, a detente or better, perestroika of cinematic opinion) but however such is Stoner's situation that (cos of the kids, his job, his trappedness) he's in a situation that he can only break it off with her, which he does, boo-hoo de hoo. Cue slushpuppy lovemaking, weepy tears, regret ‘til dying days as the coed hightails her tail out of town lest she be lynched or something (small town USA, I tells ya...) which sex is chastely described: always Stoner and Kate "make love", which is cute and I was ok with because 50 Grey Shades wouldn't quite have worked here.

So anyway she leaves town and Stoner pines like a schoolgirl, losing lots of weight and has to lie down a lot, and is looked after (if you can call it that) by his psycho wife for a bit til he gets over it (which, it transpires, is never). I mean, Jesus. Hemmingway would have killed the guy for being an affront to masculinity. Even Rabbit Angstrom would have itched to punch the guy -maybe not in the face though- just to make him wake up and smell the delphiniums.

Hence the overall tone of the book is described, its selling point dribbles out of the pages. Everyone loves a good wallow in sadness, and Williams tries to give us what we want. (I believe the term is “misery lit�.) Stoner's life entire, fits the bill.

Happily, sometime later, like about 15 years after she escapes, coed Kate writes her magisterial thesis on something to do with influence of Latin on Mediaeval English/Dramturgy or something and dedicates it pseudo-cryptically to Stoner ("TO W.S."). Lovely. Cue eyes brimming with tears, longing sighs, regrets etc. I get it, Williams. Is it my cue?
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If there is that delicious thoroughgoing dashing of hope in all realms of human endeavour, if Williams racks Stoner in his horribly quotidian Procrustean bed of a life, to try and build up reservoir of sad in me, then the last few pages, meant to be the authorial money shot to cap off all this dejection and frustration of dreams - the pages of Stoner's slow senescence and dying - didn't quite quite work (for me). It didn't make me dissolve into weepy tears or strike me sadly or well, do much anything to me.ÌýThis abbreviated version of Broch’s titanic Death of Virgil (forgive me Prof Stoner for amusing myself with this irony,) suffered by its brevity. The whole book did, really.

But look; maybe I am being too hard on him. Those pages were ok overall. I just don't gush like McEwan or (gack) Julian Barnes (two pretty mediocre writers imo) and say that this book is the best thing since some brightspark boffin introduced the Chorleywood process to calibrated industrialised slicing machines and shrink wrap. I mean my copy has a big red circle on the front quoting the Times (guessing the "UK Times") saying "THE GREATEST NOVEL YOU'LL NEVER READ" which is some damn clever reverse psychology because seeing these blurbed authors blubbing, and buffed up by the Clever Reverse Psychology Marketing swingeing down upon my rational decision making processes like Bulow's army at Placenoit engaging Napoleons flank, potential readers - me included - will make a "challenge accepted" face and pluck this off the shelf like a raptor swooping on a fledgling for a light snack or indeed, like Bluchers brave chaps engaging those blasted Frenchies. (As an aside, sadly the "Greatest Novel you'll never read" schtick is not this book (just hilarious even to contemplate its even suggested) at all but is, for most readers, Proust's In Search of Lost Time or Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake or The Bible or Man Without Qualities or and so on, so on. This book is metely 'ok' and there are hundreds better. Marketing, eh.)
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Anyway. Now the proper ending, which gave me pause for a bit. Moments before death Stoner (remember him? Good! Cause no one else does!) reaches for a book from his bookpile (I think it might have been one of his own) and the book falls to the floor as he pops his clogs. A nice symbol, ambiguous and multimodal. The decay of academe? The Casaubon-like futility of knowledge? The abiding love for words unto death? The futility of loving books? All of these, perhaps, but rather than a celebration of the wonder of books, the love one can have for them, I see Stoner’s life as a cautionary tale. Sure books can be amazing, capture the soul, enrapture imagination etc, but there's more to life than books, ev'rybody. Like, life. Stoner knew this, but didn’t quite know how to live. Reading Stoner, Williams hopes we reflect, gain an answer to the question that the short-lived hard rock band Audioslave asked ( ) and after reflection realise as Paul Valery entreats in his "LeÌýcimetière marin": “il faut tenter de vivre!â€�. Indeed. Il faut tenter indeed.