2. The Unrivaled Thrill of Unrelieved Narration

I want to return briefly to the initial impression of Stoner offered by the author’s agent, Marie Rodell. I am doing so not because I have a secret desire to humiliate literary agents—on the contrary, my desire to humiliate literary agents is quite public at this point—but because her assessment of the novel is so spectacularly wrongheaded. She fretted that Stoner would never sell because “its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion.”

In fact, the novel’s narrative style is precisely what makes it so gripping. To trace out what I mean requires a crash course in the art of narration. I’ll begin at the beginning.

Human beings are a storytelling species. Stories are how we construct ourselves and pluck meaning from the rush of experience. For most of our history as a species, the work of storytelling was done around a campfire. Teller and audience shared the same words, the same mythology, the same customs and cosmology. The invention of written and then printed stories initiated a disjunction. Suddenly, stories were being crafted for readers from another culture and another time. This required writers to create an entity—the narrator—capable of serving as a guide to the world of the story.

The narrator sets out the basic dramatic context of the story, the properties of the world in question, the relevant histories, natures, and motives of the characters. At times, the narrator offers broader insights into human nature, generally traceable to the author. When the story moves into scene, the narrator swoops into a more subjective mode, offering us the psychic and sensual experiences of particular characters.

The authors of the great novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century granted their narrators powers that would seem audacious by modern standards. Consider Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

All was confusion in the Oblonsky’s house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him…

Why does Tolstoy open with that sweeping generalization? Why not start with the tumult in the Oblonsky house, which so elegantly prefigures Anna’s fate? Because Tolstoy needed to establish a narrator who could offer universal insights, who was concerned, not just about adultery, but the elusive nature of happiness.

What marks literature as distinct from any other artistic genre is this relationship we have with the narrator. Readers want to know that someone candid and highly observant is running the show. They want to be in congress with a compelling intellect. Without a narrator, a story isn’t being told, it’s just being.

*

It’s important to reiterate here that Rodell was absolutely right to call Stoner’s narrative style “out of fashion.” The tradition of strong, independent narrators—exemplified in the American tradition by Henry James—had been on the wane for decades by the time Williams came along.

Modernist writers, most prominently James Joyce, introduced a new style of prose that sought to convey the ornate fluctuations of the mind, the swirl of sensations and insights, urges and inhibitions, that came to be known as stream-of-consciousness. In novels such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later, Ulysses, the hero’s perceptions became the central form of action.

At the other end of the spectrum was the objective style of narration championed by Hemingway. His central innovation as a stylist was to write short declarative sentences in which description implied emotion and psychology. The attentive reader came to understand that Nick Adams was a traumatized veteran by the way he set up camp. Action became perception. To Hemingway, among the first writers born into the age of motion pictures, the narrator isn’t an intellect or a sensibility so much as a carefully trained movie camera.

I mention these two writers because they epitomize opposing narrative strategies, both of which are widely imitated and (I’m sorry to report) continue to desecrate student manuscripts. I should know; I’ve read thousands in the past two decades.

To survey a particularly vexing subset of these, let us return to the dawn of the millennium, when I worked as an Adjunct Professor of Bitterness at various Boston area colleges. Back then, I continually encountered stories in which the hero was an unnamed man, often unshaven, who woke in a strange hotel or bar or dorm room with no idea where he was or why. Invariably, something traumatic had happened to him and to her, a mysterious female pronoun—presumably his beloved. Our hero didn’t know exactly what had happened though, because, as would eventually emerge, he suffered from anterograde amnesia, a rare form of short-term memory loss that afflicts vast numbers of fictional characters. In an effort to remain loyal to the protagonist’s disorientation, the remainder of the story consisted of frenetic scene fragments, chronologically mutilated for maximum profundity.

My standard reaction to these pieces was to jot earnestly flummoxed queries in the margins such as “Where are we?” and “Are the italics flashbacks?” and “Is it possible I’m missing a page?” Then office hours would roll around and I would say to the author, “I found your story really ambitious, Jason, but I’m not sure I totally understood it.”

Jason would look at me with the sort of pity summonable only by a college sophomore and utter the six words I came to dread: “Have you seen the movie Memento?” No, I would say, I hadn’t seen that one, and Jason would explain that his story was inspired by Memento. Then Jason would recite the plot of that film, in its entirety, while I sat quietly in my cubicle chair mulling suicide.

In an effort to broach the virtues of more traditional narration I sometimes mentioned Emma by Jane Austen, at which point Jason would inform me that he had never seen that movie. This was back in the dark ages of the Internet. No social media. No Wifi. Cell phones were still dumb. My students read books, when assigned to do so by well-meaning primitives such as myself. But mostly they watched movies and TV shows.

Their style of narration thus managed to fuse the cinematic opacity of Hemingway with the claustrophobic interiority of Joyce. They lodged the camera behind the eyes of their protagonists but failed to establish who those protagonists were, where they were, and what was at stake for them. The reader thus wound up in a state of unproductive bewilderment. I say unproductive because there are, of course, productive forms of bewilderment. We write stories precisely because we seek to make sense of the bewildering aspects of human endeavor: love, loss, desire, regret. These stories were more like language-based Sudoku puzzles.

*

Why do so many writers place the cart of action before the horse of narration? Often, we’re simply driving blind. We don’t know the story we want to tell when we sit down to write and hope action will lead us to the promised land of plot. Sometimes we know the world of the story so well that we forget the reader doesn’t. But the most common culprit is insecurity.

The contemporary writer—steeped in the audio-visual pizzazz of screen-based storytelling—is likely to suffer an immediate and crushing sense of doubt. We feel that we must locate the impatient reader in a world so enveloping she will be unable to turn away. Thus, the dogma of show-don’t-tell predominates, nurtured by workshops and later literary agents, who dismiss exposition as dull, mere info dumps.

We continually forget that readers don’t want fancy prose. They want a narrator to tell them a story. In the absence of a narrator, the only way for a writer to deliver information is by having characters think or say it, which reduces characters to self-conscious and inefficient tools of narration.

Leaping into scenes without providing the necessary context requires writers to interrupt the action to insert this context, which forces readers to reinterpret what they’ve already read and blunts the forward momentum of the story. Too often, we use scenes to provide background information, mostly by having characters sit around thinking things. Not only is this pattern dull, it represents a misappropriation of scene.

Scenes are meant to instigate or escalate action, to isolate those instances when a character’s destiny is disrupted by desire or misfortune or opportunity, when he is forced into conflict—with someone else and/or himself.

A few years back, I led a class examining the craft aspects of a single novel. To prepare, I evaluated every scene in Stoner, asking a simple question: what work does it do? I broke down a passage midway through the book, for instance, in which Stoner teaches a graduate seminar. This one unassuming scene dramatizes Stoner’s talent as a teacher, his devotion to literature, his timidity in the face of conflict, the interplay between his passion and passivity, and his doomed idealism; it introduces two key characters, including his eventual love interest; and it instigates and escalates a budding rivalry. It does all this work simultaneously.

Storytelling is not some mystical pursuit. It is mostly about building psychologically and emotionally reliable ramps to moments that matter and then slowing down.

*

It was reading Stoner, over and over and over, that taught me these lessons. I wanted to understand, as a writer, the specific mechanisms of its enthrallment. The book begins with that blunt little obituary, which has the curious effect of shifting the reader’s interest away from Stoner’s achievements and toward an accounting of his internal experience.

What’s less apparent about this opening, but just as crucial, is that it establishes a narrator capable of covering huge swaths of time and experience in a few sentences. This latitude allows Williams to present the precise moments that endanger his hero. Thus, barely two pages into the novel, Stoner’s father proposes that his son go to college to study agriculture, a notion that has never occurred to the boy.

William, who has never been further than fifteen miles from home, has to swallow to steady his voice. Then he looks to his mother for counsel. What follows is a couplet that quivers with unspoken anxieties and regrets.

She said tonelessly, “You do what your pa says.”
“You really want me to go?” he asked, as if he half hoped
for a denial. “You really want me to?”

Williams reaches this crossroad so quickly because he relies on vivid exposition to convey the grinding routine and grim prospects of farm life. Rather than dragging the reader through lengthy scenes of Stoner toiling in the fields, slopping the pigs, and casting wistful gazes at the horizon, we get only the scene that matters, as Stoner struggles to reckon with the upheaval of his life.

Two hundred words later, our hero has reached the university, where he feels an unprecedented serenity. A few pages after that, Archer Sloane reads a Shakespeare sonnet and Stoner’s world explodes again. He settles on becoming a teacher, but hides this decision from his parents. No sooner has he confessed to them when World War I begins, and he has to decide whether to enlist. Then he falls in love with Edith and marries her, and must immediately confront that the union is a disaster.

Every few pages Stoner is slammed up against some harrowing realization, some impossible decision, some uncontrollable urge. There is no down time. This relentless pacing is a direct result of the narration Rodell disparaged as unrelieved and out of fashion. But Williams understood what he was up to. “A great deal more is going on in the novel than appears on the surface,” he assured his agent, “and its technique is a great deal more ‘revolutionary’ than it appears to be.”

What he meant, I think, is that he had hit upon a strategy that combined objective efficiency and subjective intensity in pursuit of one man’s inner life. Most novels, after all, marshal their energies toward the fulfillment of a particular goal: a marriage must be made, a love consummated, a crime punished, a sinner redeemed, a feud settled, a family repaired. William Stoner fulfills several of these goals. But Stoner’s attention remains fixed not on public outcome but private reverberation.

Of Williams’s contemporaries, the only novelist I can think of who attempts something similar is Evan S. Connell (Mrs. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge). This is not to suggest that John Updike and Saul Bellow and Tony Morrison don’t offer us deep access to the consciousness of their characters. But these novelists—among the most influential of their age—allot their energies to broader goals: explorations of race, cultural morality, and philosophical inquiry. Most of their books have elaborate plots and ensemble casts and what the critics dependably refer to as “an indelible prose style.”

In Stoner, Williams sought to perfect what he called “the plain style,” an approach he traced back to Stoicism, which emphasized reason over emotion, and sentences whose power derived from naturalistic description rather than stylistic flourishes. When Williams speaks about the novel as revolutionary, I take him to mean that he created a narrator at once omniscient and transparent, able to depict his hero with an unvarnished precision and to fathom the deepest regions of his psyche, a narrator that wed the virtues of Hemingway and Joyce.

*

There are other notable aspects of Stoner that contribute to its potency. For instance, the novel is entirely devoid of subplots. Every expository passage presages a scene in which Stoner is forced to act, and every action he takes drives the story forward. The plot turns not on coincidences but confrontations that register as astonishing and inevitable.

Williams also limits his supporting cast, all of whom play complex and shifting roles in Stoner’s life. Edith begins as an object of desire, becomes his chief antagonist, and winds up a loyal companion. Hollis Lomax is a potential friend before he curdles into a bitter rival.

One of the central challenges of this approach is that Stoner himself, while learned, is not a deeply reflective person. He has intense emotional reactions to the world, and a steadfast conscience, but he is often blind to his own motives and intentions. This is a challenge for any novel, especially one so narrowly focused on a single character’s experience.

Novelists in the tradition of Thackeray and Austen and George Eliot met this challenge by allowing their narrators to editorialize, to batter their benighted characters. Williams does not. His narrator remains an impartial (if ruthless) observer, not a commentator.

Instead, he surrounds Stoner with characters who assail him with the truths he cannot or will not see. Chief among these is Archer Sloane, the man who identifies Stoner’s calling as a teacher. Just as significant is Dave Masters, one of two friends Stoner makes as a graduate student, who exposes Stoner’s grandiose delusions about academia. Both men haunt Stoner. They are the dark prophets who illuminate his destiny.

*

What’s most inspiring about the writing of Stoner is that John Williams began his career writing in precisely the same manner as those undergraduates who used to show up at my office hours to discuss their Momento rip-offs. I know this because some years ago a fellow Stonerian sent me a copy of Williams’ appalling debut novel, Nothing But the Night, which opens like this:

In this dream where he was weightless and unalive, where he was a pervading mist of consciousness that seethed and trembled in a vast stretch of dark, there was at first no feeling, only a dim sort of apperception, eyeless, brainless, and remote, whose singular ability was to differentiate between himself and the darkness.

I am sorry to report that this ectoplasmic drivel continues for several more pages. We are trapped inside the addled mind of some unidentified male who can barely make out his surroundings. It’s actually more garishly inchoate than any student work I’ve ever received. Here’s how the first chapter ends:

Subtly, easily, soundlessly, as if he were an intangible atmosphere, he merged with the resting body, became one with it in a sudden and inexplicable chemistry, realized in a brief flash of agony that this was his real identity, that this was himself; and just before the curtain of dark fell, he looked up out of the young man’s abruptly opened eyes, saw the needless sea of the crowd’s face, heard again the animal scream of its hatred, felt their brutal hands upon his body, saw their fists upraised to smash bloodily downward, felt an instant shock of pain, and then the sea of blood darkened and he swam in utter blackness and knew no more.

To reiterate: this prose was crafted by the same person who wrote Stoner.

Alan Swallow, who published Nothing But the Night, was refreshingly blunt about its faults. It lacked “a certain consistency or observable direction of development” and indulged in “rather deliberate obscurantism.” Swallow believed his protégé might be the sort of writer “who needs to throw away two or three novels before the thing starts clicking.”

Williams was too headstrong to throw away his novels. But he learned from their mistakes. His second book managed to bleed out the calculated confusion and overwrought prose. But the story revealed a writer still driven to court the epic, one who relied on vivid landscapes and bloody action to compensate for a lack of character development.

That Williams eventually wrote Stoner into being attests to the author’s imagination and native talent, but more so to his humility. It took him two decades, but he managed to eradicate his impulse to impress the reader. His third novel represents a sustained and monumental act of attention. Take it as a radical, even revolutionary, example of what happens when writers silence their egos, ignore the fraudulent wisdom of the marketplace, and place their faith in the virtues of unrelieved narration.