{"id":113,"date":"2007-08-17T00:03:08","date_gmt":"2007-08-17T00:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/stoner.html"},"modified":"2007-08-17T00:03:08","modified_gmt":"2007-08-17T00:03:08","slug":"stoner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/stoner.html","title":{"rendered":"Stoner"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, this novel by John Williams<\/a> is not about reefer madness in the Gilded Age, no matter what the title and cover art may tempt you into thinking.
\nIt’s of one of my favorite genres, the academic novel…
\n…..(favorites being David Lodge’s\u00a0pertinent books,\u00a0 Michael Malone’s Foolscap,<\/em><\/a> and Russo’s Straight Man<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Speaking of\u00a0Russo…one more month<\/a><\/em>! Funny…my local bookstores haven’t yet started advertising their midnight Bridge of Sighs<\/em> 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?\u00a0Probably. Don’t ask me to repeat it. It’s too painful to think about.) \u00a0
\n…..and one of which I’d never heard, even though its author won a National Book Award (not for this one, but for this.)<\/a>.
\nStoner 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.
\nIt 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; \u00a0inter-departmental difficulties, an affair with a student, a late-life revelation and renewal, and death.
\nAlthough 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.
\nWhat 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<\/em> – 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.\u00a0 You could say that such is life…but I’m not convinced it is.
\n(Upcoming…Georges Simenon, Cormac McCarthy, the anti-Cardinal<\/em> and, er…Janet Evanovich. Did you see down there where I mention “scrounging around beach houses?” Yeah.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0pertinent books,\u00a0 Michael Malone’s Foolscap, and Russo’s Straight Man.\u00a0\u00a0Speaking of\u00a0Russo…one more month! Funny…my local…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,18,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-books","category-current-reads"],"yoast_head":"\nStoner - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/stoner.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stoner - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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