Book review: John Williams' Stoner

A fiction book, by a college teacher, about a college teacher, tracing the arc of his life from his teen years until the very last moments.

Overall, the form is much like Henry James with either Washington Square or the better, more polished follow-up book Portrait of a Lady.  We see an overview of a life, unfolding almost distantly in a condensed form, with John Williams allowing for snippets of dialog and scraps of scenes.  In individual chapters, elements seems to mimic or coincide in a dimly harmonious fashion, alongside and with the events of Stoner's life, such as the world wars, impressions of colleagues and happenings within his classroom.

The perspective is third person omniscient, and for many of the scenes we are only told that Stoner has spoken, without Williams revealing the exact wording, as if we were somewhere inside Stoner, like some part of his personality that lacked access to the ears, so we could not then hear what was said, but maybe we hear a rumbling as to know in general that Stoner had spoken.  In this respect, Stoner is as opaque to us as he is to himself, with Williams being steadfast at keeping with Stoner's unawareness at so much of his own feelings, then to look in a kind of unfeeling wonder upon so many of the scenes around him.  That said, he is not without emotions, but those are opaque to us through so much of the book, and only hinted at in Stoner's dialog, which leaves us with an ambiguity as to whether Stoner's emotions are genuine in certain portions of the story.  However, we do not question his earnestness, for he is earnest about being opaque to us, which paints a kind of stoic totem in the form of Stoner that we follow through those pages.  And, Williams describes Stoner's overall appearance in the briefest detail, telling us of physical changes over time, so that we, while at once marveling at his inner dullness in so much of experiences, can also see him from the outside, in terms of an overall impression that he might make among the people he interacts with in the book.

With world events at points mentioned, unfolding in tandem with Stoner's life, we are left to wonder if Stoner might be emblematic of something, some fundamental shift or coming of age in America or the world-at-large, yet we are assured that Stoner simply becomes as so many of his own older colleagues, that the condition existed before, and Stoner's contemporaries would also possibly face the same fate.  This political reflection comes into view but then fades long before the end of the story, and Stoner seems to be something of a disinterested observer, like the existential consciousness of America, called also "stoic" by others, watching and sometimes feeling, sometimes responding, but overall, not effected by the changes around him.