Michael Perkins's Reviews > Stoner

I re-read Stoner and here are some of my impressions the second time around.

Much of the book is telling not showing. In the first 20% of the book Stoner hardly says anything but "yes, sir" and "no, sir." Instead the reader gets this extended background article on Stoner, like a long CV. The author also inserts history excerpts here and there, for example about the stoicism of the Romans, that sound as if they're text grabs from Wikipedia.

Here's a sample of a Stoner interaction....

"William Stoner realized that for several moments he had been holding his breath. He expelled it gently, minutely aware of his clothing moving upon his body as his breath went out of his lungs. . . . Light slanted from the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from within them and go out against a dimness; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Stoner became aware that his fingers were unclenching their hard grip on his desk-top. He turned his hands about under his gaze, marveling at their brownness, at the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt finger-ends; he thought he could feel the blood flowing invisibly through the tiny veins and arteries, throbbing delicately and precariously from his fingertips through his body.

Sloane was speaking again. “What does he say to you, Mr. Stoner? What does his sonnet mean?”

Stoner’s eyes lifted slowly and reluctantly. “It means,” he said, and with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the figure of Archer Sloane. “It means,” he said again, and could not finish what he had begun to say."

This moment is the closest Stoner ever comes to literary criticism in the entire book; not only does he not say anything about the sonnet, he isn’t even thinking about it.

I also find the author's descriptive style very cliched, the "cracked hands" of his father farmer and so on. There are whole passages like this I could paste in.

At one point, one of Stoner's colleagues goes into a rant about how no one in the cruel world cares about literature and so they are all martyrs to a beautiful cause that is doomed to failure. This gives the sense that bibliophiles are somehow a misunderstood minority. I don't feel that way, but perhaps some readers do. And I do think the author expected readers to sympathize with Stoner, no matter his faults and some of his bad behavior.

Meanwhile, attempts to compare the writing in this book to Nabokov or Proust don't work, IMHO.

==========

Astute review of Stoner that goes into more detail...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

==============

Another interesting review....

"Williams’s cultural revival has coincided, not surprisingly, with the demand that art be relatable, allowing the audience to easily fit themselves in. But to be relatable, art must also be incurious, not really interested in the mechanisms of why people are what they are, the texture of their lives, or the objects around them. To be interested in these things is to generate friction between the reader and the text, or at least to elude easy points of identification."

This is the opposite of Proust, who is intensely interested in and perceptive of the world around him, the people he encounters, the beauty of the arts. Life is endlessly fascinating. All described in beautiful prose.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-pup...