David's Reviews > Stoner

I was going to start out this review of Stoner by feigning comic incredulity that the former conductor of the Boston Pops wrote a novel about potheads, but that is far, far too obvious and unsatisfying even for the likes of me. Instead, I am going to confess that I read only half of it (and, thereby, my ignorance has been properly disclaimed) but that this aborted reading filled me with such unmitigated contempt for the author that I plan on mounting every soapbox (if soapboxes haven't been technologically obviated by now) from here to the Great Barrier Reef condemning this plodding, tiresome, amateurish book with an antagonistic passion that literature hasn't evoked in me since Cambridge's A Concise History of France (wherein concision meant excising significant historical events in favor of agricultural data and a dimly Marxist perspective, but I digress -- as always).

I shouldn't blame John Williams for my rising blood pressure because in fact YOU are to blame. Yes, you. Perhaps not individually, but in the general sense of Goodreads voters and reviewers, of which you are presumably a constituent. As of this moment, Stoner has an average rating of 4.39 stars out of five on the basis of 531 Goodreader ratings. This is a remarkable score, to be sure, but as with many averages, it is complete and utter bullshit -- obviously contaminated by the spurious opinions of the ardent fans of graceless, tedious prose. You know who you are.

Let's parse the data, shall we? 459 people gave this turd four or five stars; whilst only eleven people were courageous enough to call a spade a spade and, against the grain of general opinion, to award it only one or two stars. I consider these eleven people heroes. You and your ilk can eulogize the armed forces, the pigs, the schlubby, mustachioed rescue workers, with your tearful montages of wars, standoffs, and celebrity house fires, all assembled to the reactionary tunes of 3 Doors Down or Nickelback; I prefer a subtler form of heroism -- you know, the lone voice who amid the Russophilic, ostentatiously intellectual acclaim for Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita dares to raise an eyebrow at this dry Goethe wannabe...

I therefore am a great hero because, fighting the insidious cabal of 'respectable' opinion, I offer my head to the rabble in order to warn you what a lifeless stinkbomb Stoner is. John Williams, I suspect, was an author who was better suited to actuarial work or fumigating. Something more prosaic. His main problem is that he wants desperately to tell you everything. He's adamant that you know this or that about his main character William Stoner's psychological make-up, habits, and proclivities, but unfortunately he'd rather put Mr. Stoner behind a glass wall at the zoo and recite a bunch of vague adjectives and banal activities relevant to him. In placing Stoner in the zoo and preparing a dry summation about him, he deprives Stoner of life, abbreviates him into a concept...

This is one of the worst kind of all writers, in my opinion. He's committed to telling us and not to showing us. He wants to control your attitude toward the characters by completely demystifying them. Williams lays everything on the table, as if he's handing you a psychological abstract. More than a few times, I wished that John Williams were not dead and were ready-at-hand, so I could give him a chocolate swirlie. And then I pulled back in my condemnation for a moment... I rethought my rage... There are literally jillions of shitty writers on this planet, and a not-insignificant number have had their works published. Why should I blame John Williams for having a dream -- a grand ambition? I wish for nothing less myself. The intended repository for my rage and general ill-will should be those who have applauded this crapfest -- the ones who've elevated it to the status of minor classic of 20th century American literature.

The straw which broke the etc. came midway through the book when Stoner's wife, until then a mousy, retiring, sickly sort, adopts a new attitude after the death of her father. She bobs her hair (it's the 1920s) and throws out her old clothes and buys some of those shapeless flapper-type shifts, and -- more consequentially -- she declares war on her husband. The psychology might as well be written in neon. She resents the dull (and not very affluent) academic life her husband provides. The switch is so abrupt and ridiculous that all of the author's explanations and expositions do nothing to make it palatable, even in his stubbornly distanced and abstract telling. I've read better character development when we got in small groups to discuss our first stories in Creative Writing 101.