William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life

Declaring that “our favorite novels aren’t just books” but “manuals for living,” short story writer and essayist Almond (Bad Stories) finds his own such manual in John Williams’s Stoner, which he explores in a thoughtful fusion of literary criticism and personal confessional. Almond identifies the acclaimed 1965 novel, about English professor William Stoner’s personal and professional struggles, as being told through “unrelieved narration,” which he posits as a throwback to pre-Modernist writers such as Henry James. Then, he relates this observation to his own experiences teaching creative writing, distinguishing Williams’s “strong, independent narrator” from students of his whose attempts to convey their characters’ disorientation instead induced a “state of unproductive bewilderment” in the reader. Elsewhere, Almond’s evaluation of William Stoner’s troubled marriage, as depicting a “kind of isolation peculiar to modern marriage,” leads to a consideration of his own courtship of his wife, Erin. Ruefully, he acknowledges that their hasty, unceremonious elopement represented not the meaningfully antiestablishment gesture he then imagined, but his selfish insistence on “treating their love as something to be minimized, even concealed, rather than celebrated.” This sort of interpenetration of the literary and the personal pervades the book, a moving celebration of Williams’s novel and of the importance of literature as a whole. (June)