Jim Fonseca's Reviews > Stoner
Stoner
by
by
I read Stoner after I saw that almost all my friends on GR had read it. It’s an impressive work which I finished months ago but hard a hard time figuring out what to say about it with thousands of reviews already out there.
Stoner is the life story of an unremarkable man and the consensus seems to be “he did his best.” He came from a Missouri farm family and a poor background but manages to become an English professor at the university. One theme is the ‘loneliness’ and ‘distant courtesy’ of many of the characters, which I think applies to Stoner himself. This may be a trait of many academic folks who have some kind of social disability and turn to books as a substitute for social interaction.
He’s awkward around women but finally marries. Then we get I think, the most tragic lines in the book: “Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.”
His wife is constantly exhausted and at the edge of hysteria. After they have a child (a girl) his wife seems so uninterested in the child that Stoner becomes mother and father. His wife deliberately takes away any pleasures he has, such as converting his den to her “art studio” so that he can’t spend time alone with his daughter while he works as she does her homework. Let’s put it this way: his wife is “nucking futs.”
His life at the university offers limited respite to his hell at home. He gets into what is initially a trivial dispute with his department chair. The chair become his sworn enemy and punishes Stoner by taking away his graduate seminar courses. To a large extent Stoner is “an academic novel” highlighting all the backbiting and pettiness we’ve come to expect in these stories.
One faculty member says: “It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear.”
Stoner lets himself become a little crazy in the classroom. He loses the notes and becomes a good teacher, but this takes him several years “He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher…” His younger colleagues recognize him as “a ‘dedicated’ teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt…”
He has contradictory feelings about his life. On one hand: “He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.” And yet, and yet…. “Except for Edith’s absence from it, his life was nearly what he wanted it to be.”
“He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another…” “Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.”
He thinks “What did you expect?” and that becomes his mantra as he lies on his death bed. Is he heroic? Or is he a loser?
It’s easy for an outsider to look back at Stoner’s life and tell him where he went wrong. Just as we can imagine a good friend or a brother or a sister telling us “you should have done this, Jim; you should have done that.” It’s obvious to them where we went wrong; yet they can’t see all the things we think and feel at the time; they can’t live our lives for us and despite all the advice and evidence that we should have done THIS or done THAT, instead we DON’T do that or we DO something entirely different. So as I look at Stoner’s life, here’s where I think he went wrong. Easy for me to say. I’ll put this in a spoiler in the unlikely event that there is anyone still out there who has not yet read Stoner:
(view spoiler)
Well, Stoner, “What did you expect?” How did that work out for you?
photo of the author from thefriendlyshelfiles.wordpress.com
Stoner is the life story of an unremarkable man and the consensus seems to be “he did his best.” He came from a Missouri farm family and a poor background but manages to become an English professor at the university. One theme is the ‘loneliness’ and ‘distant courtesy’ of many of the characters, which I think applies to Stoner himself. This may be a trait of many academic folks who have some kind of social disability and turn to books as a substitute for social interaction.
He’s awkward around women but finally marries. Then we get I think, the most tragic lines in the book: “Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.”
His wife is constantly exhausted and at the edge of hysteria. After they have a child (a girl) his wife seems so uninterested in the child that Stoner becomes mother and father. His wife deliberately takes away any pleasures he has, such as converting his den to her “art studio” so that he can’t spend time alone with his daughter while he works as she does her homework. Let’s put it this way: his wife is “nucking futs.”
His life at the university offers limited respite to his hell at home. He gets into what is initially a trivial dispute with his department chair. The chair become his sworn enemy and punishes Stoner by taking away his graduate seminar courses. To a large extent Stoner is “an academic novel” highlighting all the backbiting and pettiness we’ve come to expect in these stories.
One faculty member says: “It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear.”
Stoner lets himself become a little crazy in the classroom. He loses the notes and becomes a good teacher, but this takes him several years “He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher…” His younger colleagues recognize him as “a ‘dedicated’ teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt…”
He has contradictory feelings about his life. On one hand: “He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.” And yet, and yet…. “Except for Edith’s absence from it, his life was nearly what he wanted it to be.”
“He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another…” “Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.”
He thinks “What did you expect?” and that becomes his mantra as he lies on his death bed. Is he heroic? Or is he a loser?
It’s easy for an outsider to look back at Stoner’s life and tell him where he went wrong. Just as we can imagine a good friend or a brother or a sister telling us “you should have done this, Jim; you should have done that.” It’s obvious to them where we went wrong; yet they can’t see all the things we think and feel at the time; they can’t live our lives for us and despite all the advice and evidence that we should have done THIS or done THAT, instead we DON’T do that or we DO something entirely different. So as I look at Stoner’s life, here’s where I think he went wrong. Easy for me to say. I’ll put this in a spoiler in the unlikely event that there is anyone still out there who has not yet read Stoner:
(view spoiler)
Well, Stoner, “What did you expect?” How did that work out for you?
photo of the author from thefriendlyshelfiles.wordpress.com
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
Stoner.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Started Reading
November 17, 2017
–
Finished Reading
January 23, 2018
– Shelved
January 23, 2018
– Shelved as:
academic-novel
January 23, 2018
– Shelved as:
american-authors
January 23, 2018
– Shelved as:
favorite-books
Comments Showing 1-50 of 125 (125 new)
message 1:
by
CanadianReader
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Jan 23, 2018 03:46PM
reply
|
flag
Yes passive, too passive, is an excellent word for him
Thanks Peter!
Thanks Henry. I would encourage you to read this one. 4.28 rating on GR is pretty good --- hard to find many that high with thousands of ratings
Thanks Ilse. Yes, I suppose that could even have been the title: What Did You Expect? Depressing but true.
Thank you Pedro
Thanks Marcus, and I suppose that since we feel sorry for him he may not be heroic
Yes, this is a case I think where it's very high GR ratings are accurate --- almost everyone rates it very highly
My own take of 'Stoner' is that there are just some people around who are essentially good but don't know what's good for them.
I think you're right John - quiet desperation seems apt
Now that you mention it, I don't recall that Stoner had any friends, did he? Other than the woman he had the affair with. So no male friends
Thanks Cecily -- yes, I'm sorry I did not read it earlier. Which makes me wonder, how does one find the books that you "should" read?
I'm glad you liked the review Tina. I think your book club is too strict -- no fun! Yes, I agree Stoner was "good" but perhaps that means he was too passive and didn't want to rock the boat. So some might say he let everyone walk all over him.
In my case, it's about having a circle of GR friends whose opinions I trust. Not that I'll necessarily agree with them on everything, but that they explain their views well enough to make up my own mind. It also helps that I don't let my number of friends get too big.
In my case, it's about having a circle of GR friends whose opinions I trust. Not that I'll necessarily agree with them on every..."
That seems to be a reasonable approach
Yes it's time to read it!
You're welcome Cheryl. Maybe it's time for a re-read!
Thank you Maureen
Thanks Abigail, same with me. I added it to my favorites.
Thanks Mayke, it's really good. I hadn't thought to see what else he wrote until your comment. It looks like he only has two historical novels, one about Rome and one about the American west. There's another but it's not highly rated and has some bad reviews. Some poetry too.
I don't think most novelists describe the kind of universities that I see. Maybe because they generally write about English departments? They still tend to be more cynical about the job than I see among my friends and colleagues.
I don't think most novelists describe the kind of universities that I see. Maybe because they..."
Ah, a good question Jeanne. Fortunately there are always faculty who are good teachers, devoted to their students, and they keep their noses to the grindstone and keep the institution on its proper mission. Maybe the determining factor is whether or not an institution is "on the make" to ratchet up "publish or perish" and to "bring in grant money."
The two institutions I spent my career at were more like that, so I saw more of the cynicism described by novelists. In fact I've pled guilty myself at times when I was accused of being a cynic but it was always in the context of my being an administrator not in my faculty role.
I have a pet theory that because most faculty are truly 'nice people' --- self-effacing, considerate, concerned for students, reluctant to think poorly of others, and -- I hate to say it, but timid in some ways -- the occasional bully or con-man who gets in the door can do a huge amount of damage before he/she is stopped. It can take years to get rid of such a person.
Coincidentally I happen to be reading Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo who wrote the classic cynical academic novel in Straight Man. Fool is not an academic novel but it happens to have a character who is hired as a faculty member (maybe in English? haha) and who is literally 'evil' -- intent on harming and demeaning others, breaking up marriages etc.
We have had several bully/con men here, but mostly in administrative positions. There even one can do really terrible damage.
I have not read either of the two you mentioned. I liked Lucky Jim and Moo, both humorous. I looked up academic novels on wiki and saw that The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, 1952 is considered the first. [Surely someone wrote before then?] I haven't read that either but it would be interesting to go back and see the academic world from a novelist's perspective ~ 70 years ago.
You refer to some other university campus novels that you have heard about and/or read. My particular favourite, set in 1960's England, and broadly contemporaneous with Stoner is Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man.
The two novels approach the subject of academia, and the contrast with life outside the classroom, with portraits of the university 'don' that are fascinatingly from the two ends of the spectrum. Howard Kirk is, in my experience as a student (the 1980's), more representative than William Stoner of university academics. At least in the sense of some exhibitionism rather than quiet contemplative reclusiveness.
Both great novels though, and I like your review of Stoner very much.
You refer to some other university campus novels that you have heard about and/or read. My particular favourite, set in 196..."
Thanks Jonathan I am glad that you liked the review. I had not heard of The History Man at all -- I'll look into it.
You refer to some other university campus novels that you have heard about and/or read. My particular favourite, set in 196..."
I read The History Man immediately after Stoner. What a contrast! Like walking from a quiet windblown field into a noisy nightclub. I loved the Bradbury - quite a novel.
You refer to some other university campus novels that you have heard about and/or read. My particular favo..."
It looks good -- I read a few reviews -- there aren't a lot but it seems well-regarded for its humor.
Yes, his intellectual pursuits were his only escape from his home situation - other than his brief affair
I think his affair showed a potential he never realized, which made his story all the sadder.
Yes, it's like his bad situation at home drained all his energy and initiative from him.
Thank you Khush