Stoner Is You

John Edward Williams should be arrested for writing Stoner.

Except that cannot happen because he died in 1994.

The book is pure truth of an unsettling nature. He writes about the non-life that most of us live, and it hurts to read it. Life lived as failure.

The main character is William Stoner, a farm boy whose dad decides he should go to college to study agriculture. While there he accidentally falls in love with literary studies, which becomes his life. Some critics say the novel is about Stoner's primary passions - knowledge and love, but "Stoner's passions manifest themselves into failures, as proven by the bleak end of his life."

It hurts just to write those words.

He pursues a career as a college professor but his career proves to be disappointing; watered down, compromised, never fulfilling the love of literature that got him there in the first place.

He marries a woman who proves to be neurotic and bitter, and his marriage becomes painful and empty. They have a daughter who is the love of his life, but who his wife cruelly manipulates to turn her against and keep her away from her father. He has an affair with a colleague that brings him great joy, but the pettiness of others works to separate them. He has two close friends - one that supports him for his entire life, one who gets killed in WWI. That friend had a philosophical view of life that highlighted life's absurdity and unfairness; his words stuck with Stoner to the end, even though Stoner pursued a predictable path in life.

Stoner is diagnosed with terminal cancer in his sixties. He lies on his deathbed contemplating "the failure that his life must appear to be."

Every joyful expectation in his life ends in failure. And pain. Even his lifelong love of literature cannot sustain him; he was rarely able to translate that passion into his teaching, which almost always came across as lifeless.

What was the point of William Stoner's life? What is the point of anyone's life? To come up with rationalizations to justify the plodding, disappointing way we live it?

This is a painful book to read. Stoner's deathbed scene is overwhelmingly sad; it brings tears when you read it. Because there is nothing exceptional about his life as he runs it back in his mind.

We are alive. We want exceptional. We do not want to be beat down and compromised to the point where we are living this thing that we don't recognize, that hurts us instead of bringing us the joy that life is supposed to deliver.

But that is the way it goes in most cases.

This book is painful because it is full of the truth about life, not the sugarcoated version we all cling to so we can get out of bed every morning.

You should read it. It will make you cry, it will make you feel.

When you are done, smash every mirror in your house.