Glenn Russell's Reviews > Stoner

For the hardworking men and women living in the open, windswept farm country of the American Midwest during the late 19th and early 20th century, day-to-day existence was frequently harsh and occasionally downright hostile, a stark, demanding life chiseling character as can be seen above in artist Grant Wood’s American Gothic. If you take a good look at this painting and then envision a son, an only child, working the fields alongside his father, you will have a clear image of the starting point for Stoner, John Williams’ classic novel of quiet perfection.

The novel follows the life of William Stoner from his boyhood on a Missouri farm through his years as a faculty member of the English Department at the University of Missouri. William Stoner is a good man, a man of integrity, a man, as we eventually find out through his relationship with a fellow faculty member, Katherine Driscoll, capable of profound intimacy and tenderness of heart. William Stoner is also a lover of literature, accomplished scholar and dedicated teacher.

But all is not well in the life of Professor Stoner, particularly in his home life. As a beginning instructor right out of graduate school, he marries a woman barely twenty years of age from St. Louis, the daughter of a banker, a young woman by the name of Edith Elaine Bostwick. Turns out, young Edith has suffered emotional abuse. And right from the start of her marriage, Edith inflicts emotional abuse on her husband Stoner and eventually on their daughter Grace. Personally, I found reading those parts of the novel involving Edith particularly wrenching bordering on painful.

Indeed, as readers we live through the pain of Stoner dealing with Edith’s wall of emotional frigidness and coldness, which includes being relegated as a husband in his late twenties to sleeping on the parlor coach at night. Through all the years of isolation and alienation, including Edith’s wedging a wall of separation between Stoner and Grace, there is one particularly poignant scene where we read:

“Once, while Edith was upstairs, William and his daughter passed each other in the living room. Grace smiled shyly at him, and involuntarily he knelt on the floor and embraced her. He felt her body stiffen, and he saw her face go bewildered and afraid. He raised himself gently away from her, said something inconsequential, and retreated to his study.”

For a child to become bewildered and afraid when a parent expresses such tenderness and affection speaks volumes to the level of emotional abuse at home.

Rather than dwelling on the grimness of Stoner’s family life, I will conclude with a final observation: Grace gives birth to a baby boy but after one brief visit did not return to the home of her parents with her son since, as Stoner realizes on his own and Grace tells him in so many words at one point during her whiskey drinking (and, yes, a grim fact: she has turned to alcohol), she got herself pregnant in the first place to escape the prison of her mother’s presence. Well, my goodness – as readers we have a good idea what it would mean for a sensitive man like William Stoner to be deprived of a relationship with his grandson.

Turning to Stoner’s professional life, there are serious cracks within the halls of academe. He is a man of integrity and honesty and the political infighting within academic departments is famous for being vicious and nasty. I wouldn’t want to say any more so as to spoil for a reader, but I can assure you Dr. Stoner is on the receiving end of a large dose of viciousness. But through it all, our main character remains strong. One memorable paragraph from the novel:

“But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”

Incidentally, when I was a 12-year old boy I joined me father, mother and sister as we took a trip in our car from the New Jersey shore across the American Midwestern heartland of farms to pay a visit to my grandmother. On the trip out and also in my grandmother’s town, I heard a number of harrowing tales of farm life, especially for the children of farmers. I reflected on those tales of physical hardship and unending toil and thus wrote this surreal micro-fiction some years ago:

DOWN ON THE FARM

Before he leaves the city they tell him how the country doctor drives a buggy made from the flesh and bones of his former patients.

“Nothing goes to waste,” is the way they put it when he finally arrives, “we’re all farmers around here.”

He joins the doctor on his first visit to a farmhouse to attend a sick woman. Instead of a thermometer, the doctor sticks his middle finger under the woman’s tongue and says, “I’ve done this enough times to know when someone has a fever.”

He looks over the doctor’s shoulder out the farmhouse window. Beyond a skeleton tied to a pole, he sees the farmer plowing his field using his younger son harnessed as a beast of burden.

“Doesn’t that take superhuman strength?” he asks the doctor.

The doctor answers, “His older son wasn’t quite as strong, but still makes a fine scarecrow.”


American author John William (1922-1994)