Stoner Thoughts

What if one more person weighed in on John Williams' Stoner?

In We Read ‘Em So You Don’t Have To, I’ll let you know if the new book everyone’s talking about is actually worth the effort, or dig into the classic that’s never left your TBR shelf. Today: John Williams’ Stoner, as requested by Founding Member ‘Hannibal Lecteur.’

You get a fancy hardcover reissue when your book gets called “perfect”

First off, what have the critics said about it?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a pithy Book.marks image to put here, but you’ll have to take my word for it that this book has gotten rave reviews. Well, rave reviews about forty-five years or so after it was published; contemporary reviewers mostly ignored it when it came out in 1965, and the book went out of print even after Williams won a National Book Award for his 1973 novel Augustus. The book had a small devoted following until its reprint, via the New York Review Books imprint, in 2006, which began something like Stoner-mania (Reefer Madness?) around the world, as translations into various Europeans languages became unexpected bestsellers, which in turn gave the book enough international intrigue and cachet to get impassioned hosannas from critics, and thus an American by way of Europe star was born. It was, in a series of articles in the early 2010s across many publications, deemed the “Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Read” or a “perfect novel.”¹ Book reviewers love to uncover an old gem, giving the critic and the prospective reader the ability to ‘discover’ something old of quality, a precious diamond made more valuable with time and scarcity. As an added bonus, the book critic gets to write about a good old book instead of possibly wasting their time with a new book.

One underdiscussed reason for the books’ runaway success was timing; the book’s ubiquity roughly coincided with a peak moment of social media use, which gave the book a (sigh) meme-like popularity, with more avenues to distribute hyperbolic praise than ever before. This popularity, like all internet phenomena, inspired its own backlash, and then a backlash to that backlash, and so on, and so forth, producing many heated and useless arguments.² The other main reason for the book’s enduring popularity was astutely pointed out by professional Stoner-lover Steve Almond in an article on Lithub:

[F]or a work of literature to endure, something more has to happen. Readers have to develop feelings for the book. They have to become obsessed in that peculiar way that convinces them other people must read the book. This sort of evangelism is essential because of the time and attention that novels demand. In this sense, Stoner enjoyed a massive advantage that nobody foresaw. Namely, that its concerns—the redemptive power of literature, pedagogic integrity, the academy as a refuge—were aimed at the very people who were most likely to be passionate readers and influential critics.

Stoner is a book that, as Almond says, celebrates the bookish life, which means that it has appeal to the critics writing about it, the booksellers selling it, and many of the people buying it and spreading the word. That’s the kind of a vertical integration that a cartoonishly villainous railroad magnate can only dream of.