A Son of the Rock

Vintage, 2012, 290 p, plus viii p introduction by John McGahern.
Borrowed from a threatened library.

Stoner was something of a cause célèbre a couple of years ago – hence the roundel on its cover stating, “The Greatest Novel You’ve Never Read.” It is the life story of William Stoner, a son of the soil who is sent to University in Columbia, Missouri, to study agriculture in order to improve his parents’ farm. While there he has to take a course in English. Under the influence of tutor Archer Sloane he falls in love with the subject and decides to continue as an English student. There follows the inevitable estrangement with his parents and his dedication to the life of the mind. Within its pages no great events happen; World War 1, the 1930s depression and the Second World War occur more or less offstage. The focus is almost entirely on stoner and his relationships, though Archer Sloane does observe in 1917, “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute.”

He marries above himself, to banker’s daughter Edith Bostwick, a woman who shrinks from physical contact. The only exception to this is when she decides she wants a child but she then discards him as soon as conception occurs. For a while his daughter, Grace, is the consolation in his life but Edith slowly drives them away from each other. On Sloane’s retirement he is sounded out about the post of head of department but declines. The eventual beneficiary, Hollis Lomax, becomes an implacable adversary when for very good reasons Stoner refuses to approve the graduate thesis of Lomax’s favourite student. Fulfillment is promised when he has an affair with fellow teacher Katherine Driscoll, “They had been brought up to believe that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical… that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them,” but Lomax uses the situation against them.

A story of small things, then, ordinary things; of a life that may be thought unheroic, lived unflamboyantly, with only minor triumphs. In the introduction the author is quoted as saying he thinks Stoner is a hero, however, which in some senses he is. Yet he is also flawed and in particular ought to have stood up more to Edith for Grace’s sake. But some men prefer the quiet life.

The Greatest Novel You’ve Never Read? (Well, I’ve read it now so logically it no longer can be.) Nevertheless Stoner is good – and, despite occasional incursions into literary and linguistic theory, very readable. I’d like to think though, that there are greater novels I have yet to read.

Pedant’s corner:- Archduke Francis Ferdinand (Franz Ferdinand,) good-bys (goodbyes. Is good-bys an old USianism?) empoyee (employee.) Gay is used in its original sense, before it became a pseudonym for homosexual. My first sighting of the word “inenarrable” – incapable of being narrated; indescribable.