Stoner is a great book about an awful person

There’s more to life than books, you know—but not much more.

Thanks for reading These Things, Not Others! Here’s what I have planned for February. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it:

• Reviews of new fiction: Margie Sarsfield’s Beta Vulgaris (Norton); Sonya Walger’s Lion (NYRB); and Nick Newman’s The Garden (Putnam).

• An essay on the timely reissue of Rebecca West’s Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany by McNally Editions.

• Some thoughts on transgressive fiction and American Psycho, inspired by my recent review of Eric LaRocca’s latest splatterpunk novel.

• A look back at the troublesome revolutionary romanticism of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland.

But first, some thoughts on a great book that is probably a little overexposed at this point.

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Mrs. Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading. Mary Stevenson Cassatt, 1876. Photo taken at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Stoner by John Williams

Is Stoner the greatest novel ever written? Or does it just flatter the sensibilities of the meek, bookish types who are its primary audience?

For me, the answer to both questions is: Probably. I will say that I had a genuine and deeply emotional reaction to this book, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced from a novel. It is a quietly beautiful book, and as a father, I found the subplot about the estrangement of Stoner from his daughter deeply affecting. I understand the role that literature and academia play in Stoner's life, in shaping his identity, and am sympathetic to his perhaps too-strident defense of it when he feels its integrity is being undermined by a conniving fellow professor. I get Stoner, and so it's easy to fall under his sway. Author John Williams said he felt Stoner was a true hero, a sentiment echoed by those who've rescued the book from obscurity in recent years by calling it the greatest novel of all time.

But take a step back here and look at the plot dispassionately: Stoner is a guy who's so in love with books that he is incapable of developing a genuine relationship with another human being. He abandons his parents. He marries a woman for her looks, then pretty much ignores her. She becomes a neurotic wreck, but Stoner never really owns his role in making her that way. Instead, he cheats on her with one of his students. The only passion he shows is amid a petty, intradepartmental squabble of little consequence, for which he is willing to put his whole life and career on the line. He is relentlessly cruel to a disabled student. His wife cuts him out of his daughter's life, which pains him, but he makes no effort to stop her and instead withdraws from family life entirely, much to his child’s detriment. He dies thinking only of his pitiful little book.

Now, in the context of the novel, this all makes sense—it even makes Stoner kind of endearing. But we can't just accept the premise of the book outright. Williams has stacked the deck in Stoner's favor. It’s no wonder he ends up with a strong hand. Shuffle things up a bit and he doesn't look so heroic after all. Williams's treatment of Stoner's wife, presented as a shrill, vacant harridan, is a particular failing. One can imagine an equally compelling version of this book with her at its center, struggling to deal with her quiet, emotionally distant, philandering husband.

If Stoner is the greatest novel ever written, it’s because it so aptly demonstrates the power of fiction—how you can be manipulated into rooting for a petty little man simply because a masterful author utilizes all the tricks of the trade to paint him in a sympathetic light. To show us precisely what we need to fall under his spell and downplay what might otherwise interfere with the author’s vision. Too much of the contemporary commentary on Stoner, the character, verges on hagiographic, his toxic introversion and bottomless self-regard elevated to virtues, his faults and failings rendered in passive voice, as if he had no part in them, no blame.

I loved it, I questioned my love for it; I thought and thought about it. What more can you ask for?

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There’s more to life than books, you know—but not much more.