John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner has been called a “perfect novel”. Due to its unexpected rise from literary obscurity to its status as a “must-read” book in the early 2010s, it has also been called “The greatest novel you’ve never read”. That kind of talk is marketing, or headline-grabbing hyperbole. But it does speak of Stoner‘s unassuming yet remarkable qualities.
Stoner tells the story of a man with a simple life. William Stoner grows up with his parents, who work harsh, arid farmland in Missouri, prior to the outbreak of World War I. At his father’s persuasion, Stoner moves to Columbia to study agriculture at the University of Missouri. An encounter with English literature — and an imposing, intriguing literature professor — sends him on a different path, away from the land and deep into the world of the university, where he spends his whole working life.
Stoner is no hero in the stereotypical sense. He’s ordinary, if a little quirky, and something of an observer to his own life. But much of the power of this novel is not the drama, or the twists and turns (there are few), but the portrait itself — that of an ordinary man living the life that he has.
That’s what makes the opening page of Stoner so perfect in and of itself. It describes an unremarkable life — at least, unremarkable in terms of details that can be gleaned from it for the purposes of someone else: a stranger who reads his name on a research paper, or hears his name spoken in the faculty; or a former colleague who knew Stoner but didn’t really care for him, and to whom the memory of Stoner only reminds him that one day, he too will die.
An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.
— Stoner by John Williams, page 1
The perfection of that opening page is knowing that a brief summary of Stoner’s life could not capture the beauty, richness and complexity of what it was like to live that life.
One of the treasures of Stoner as a whole is that it gives the reader more than a brief summary. We have 288 pages. It brings us on the journey, granting us the privilege to be with Stoner the whole way. The stranger and the former colleague don’t get that.
Such access allows us to see Stoner’s life as a rich tapestry — and deeply beautiful. It’s beauty that can’t be replicated, or fully realised, in his published academic work, the memorial manuscript dedicated to him in the university’s Rare Books Collection or the memories of his colleagues.