No, this novel by John Williams is not about reefer madness in the Gilded Age, no matter what the title and cover art may tempt you into thinking.
It’s of one of my favorite genres, the academic novel…
…..(favorites being David Lodge’s pertinent books,  Michael Malone’s Foolscap, and Russo’s Straight Man.  Speaking of Russo…one more month! Funny…my local bookstores haven’t yet started advertising their midnight Bridge of Sighs parties. Why is that, I ask? Did I tell you about the time I missed talking to Richard Russo on the phone by approximately 87 seconds? Probably. Don’t ask me to repeat it. It’s too painful to think about.)  

…..and one of which I’d never heard, even though its author won a National Book Award (not for this one, but for this.).
Stoner is William Stoner, whose story is told from his childhood (briefly) on a Missouri farm, through his matriculation and eventual career at the University of Missouri, teaching English.
It is one of those rather quiet narratives in which nothing much “happens” but what you read is what you might expect from a novel set in an early 20th century university: an awkward, then disastrous marriage; endless rounds of teaching, some pleasure from one’s specialization; student bodies and faculties affected by war, and then affected again;  inter-departmental difficulties, an affair with a student, a late-life revelation and renewal, and death.
Although it was lucidly, at times beautifully written, giving us the essence of this man’s life in elements pulled from every ten years or so, and although Williams himself said that he was writing the story of a hero – a man who lives a quiet life and (mostly) does the right thing, who does the work, and then gets up the next day and does it again…it still left me sort of depressed.
What I couldn’t quite get, in my own reading, was the feeling that Stoner himself gets in a simply marvelous scene near the beginning of the book, when the awkward farm boy who had come to college to study agriculture, has an epiphany of sorts in his English lit survey course, when the professor asks him what one of Shakespeare’s sonnets means. He can’t answer, but in the paragraph describing his inability to answer – in the silence – we catch a glimpse of the transcendence Stoner himself glimpses, but can’t articulate. It was transcendence or greater purpose that was missing from the novel – no, no, no – not a Chipsian sort of sentiment, but any sense that there was much more to this life than simple material existence. There was little love, in the teaching little sense of service, not much joy, after those first few years in the literature. Now, that’s all fine, because that is what this character experienced, and the ultimate anonymity and sadness of it all I did find depressing rather than heroic.  You could say that such is life…but I’m not convinced it is.
(Upcoming…Georges Simenon, Cormac McCarthy, the anti-Cardinal and, er…Janet Evanovich. Did you see down there where I mention “scrounging around beach houses?” Yeah.)