It’s
often the smallest things that put you off picking up a novel for years and
years, and then after finishing it you regret not reading it sooner.
‘Stoner’
is one such book. I suppose I had avoided it for so long because I assumed,
wrongly, that it was about smoking. It is not. It’s the story of a life of a
man called William Stoner, and it is a beautiful and charming book. I wish I
had read it in 1991 before I read ‘On The Road’ – had I done so, my life might
have taken a different path altogether.
Is
it possible to have a quiet book? Because if it is, this is it. It slips along
and you are imperceptibly carried along with it. It is a work of unassuming
beauty.
It
can be summarized in one sentence: it is the story of a man who begins his life
on a dirt-poor farm and ends it as a professor at the University of Missouri.
That’s it. No murder, no road trip, no great act of kindness, just a life. You
are strangely drawn into his life and are compelled to follow Mr Stoner as the
years pass.
It’s
a reminder to the reader how anonymous and uncelebrated most of our lives have
been and will be. Here is a reasonably successful, pleasant and intelligent
man, happy with his place in the world, who is soon forgotten after he
disappears from the University and from life. How many live lives just like
his, mourned only by a few friends and family when they are gone? How many more
pass completely unmourned, without even a footnote in history?
As
I read it compelled me to think about my teachers, many of whom are now gone,
and I tried to recall what made them special men and women. My act of
remembrance is rare, and many of us pass from youth to adulthood without a
second thought to those who have guided us and shaped our thinking.
There
is a love affair in this book, and it is a moment of joy in the life of the protagonist.
Trapped in an unfortunate marriage, it seems his only way out. It is a reminder
that we all have moments in our lives that are fleeting and special. There is
no moral sounding – adultery is wrong, but somehow seems to be no great sin for
Mr Stoner. The happiness is counterbalanced by his loneliness in the end.
Like
the drawing of the hand drawing the picture, this novel is its own tribute to
the forgotten, celebrating an ordinary life with style and affection. I don’t
think I have felt so close to a fictional character for many years, or believed
on to be so close to reality.
It deserves to be read more widely and it
deserves wider praise. Certainly it does something that is quite difficult in
today’s over-analysed world: it is still an underground success, not taken up by
film companies or championed by the famous. Tom Hanks has read it, which is
good enough for me.
