John Williams' 'Stoner' & the Burden of Greatness

Maybe if the book was about smoking weed, I wouldn't have thought this hard about it.

“Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

            -John Williams, Stoner

“And at once, I knew

I was not magnificent”

            -Justin Vernon, “Holocene”

Most lives are uninteresting. In fact, there’s a case to be made that all lives are eventually uninteresting. Sure, you can run the race of time for a long time (William Shakespeare, Ghengis Khan, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Homer), but eventually the indifferent march of time will rid the world of any memory of those giants also. Even the larger than life personalities that we see today or in the recent past, those are already being forgotten, fading off into obscurity with the cruel, ever-enduring passage of time. Sure, our family and friends will remember us for a generation, maybe two, but most of us will be William Stoner.

John Williams’ Stoner was not an immediate success upon its publication in 1965. In fact, Williams (not the film composer), wouldn’t gain widespread acclaim in his lifetime until he released Augustus in 1972. Stoner, which isn’t a book about smoking pot, garnered positive reviews, yet it didn’t really make an impact in the way that a book like The Sun Also Rises had. Williams died in 1994 at 71. As the book has been reissued and entered back into print, it’s had surges in popularity. A TikToker who makes book recommendations mostly based on classics raved about it in a video that I saw in 2023, which inspired me to read it.

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There’s not much that I can say about Stoner that hasn’t already been said. For those who may not be aware of the book, here’s a brief synopsis: William Stoner was raised on a farm in Missouri at the turn of the century. He goes to college to study agriculture, but he finds a passion for literature. He goes on to get his doctorate in literature, and he becomes a professor at his alma mater. He gets married, has a child, grows distant from his wife, and then his daughter. He has an affair. He butts heads with a colleague and a crappy student. He eventually gets sick, retires, and dies.

The different sections of Stoner’s life are almost episodic. You could probably read the book somewhat out of order, and it would still make sense. Most of all, the ways that Williams details Stoner’s inner struggles is masterful. This isn’t a book that has some grand narrative that someone may get swept up in and lose their sense of the real world. It’s a very true to life story, capturing the mundane-ness of the average person, but it’s told in such a way that shows that each person’s life is as complex and complicated as we perceive our own. That, and the prose is strong. Williams has a perfect command of his language and story.

Ultimately what struck me the most was in the end. Stoner dies in the last chapter of the book. His death is an excellent close, but it’s also drawn out. Near the end of the book, he finds a cancerous tumor, and he eventually is bedridden, before he finally perishes.

Perhaps, this is simply being a symptom of being a young man, but I don’t like reading drawn out deaths in books. My own fear of the unknown and the end that we’ll all reach is enough to paralyze me in my thoughts for brief moments. It is also the reason that I’m writing a post that maybe 40 people will read.

All this being said, this isn’t how I feel when there’s a sudden death in a book. I don’t read For Whom The Bell Tolls and get lost in my own mortality as Robert Jordan meets his end. Reading a biography of Jim Morrison doesn’t fill me with panic in the ways that I feel like I would’ve knowing that Stoner’s death was reaching it’s end.

Over the summer, I read Jordan Kisner’s excellent Thin Places, which is an essay collection that very often dives into death. Whether it’s about forensic morticians, Pando, or general spirituality, I was having full on panic attacks on the beach. I thoroughly enjoyed the book (and I was relieved during essays about beauty pageants or Jesus-freaks throwing raves), but spending extended periods of time thinking about real life death and the idea of “The Other City” and the titular “thin places” separating the real world from the spiritual world, I was loaded with dread. Not only that, I’ve been reminded of mortality each time a friend of mine loses a parent. I’m eternally aware that someday the same will happen to me (or if I don’t, it will be more tragic).

Many years ago, I read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. While I forget many of the details, it was also a masterful book, and it focused on the dissolution of a midwestern American family. The father character, Alfred, is struggling with Parkinson’s and dementia. Throughout the book, his death is slowly approaching. There’s guilt surrounding his wife and three children, and it stresses the family. I read this book in my early-mid-20s, and it took me forever to finish, because of the dread it filled me with. While it highlights American anxiety and the dissolution of the family, it also shows the inevitable. Eventually, everyone dies, and the family that once was will be gone.

I’m not sure how much of my acceptance of the death at the end of Stoner is just a part of getting older, and accepting that death will eventually come for each of us. Or if it is the way that Williams wrote the book. Is there enough care that I felt like Stoner received some peace when he finally passed? To some extent, I believe it to be both.

Perhaps, with a little age and timing, I’ve found myself more open to finding the beauty in the un-magnificent. Most people will never be Homer or Shakespeare or even Jonathan Franzen or John Williams, but that’s okay. Those people are living their own immaculate (even if at times mundane) journey on the trail of life. We don’t all have to do something beautiful. It’s okay to live a wonderfully average life. It’s worth taking the time to go and read Stoner.