Close Reading

This week, a piece I wrote appeared in the Establishment. I'm so proud and happy, because that means:

Two to go. 

I've been wanting to write this essay, in one form or another, for years. I hate the book Stoner. Bottomlessly. I hate it for its mediocrity, for its use of the tired cycle of noncommunication --> bad relationships (which is constantly mined for comedy and tragedy alike), and for its prejudices, which are evidently invisible to readers who want to love characters who love literature. I was grateful for the opportunity to disseminate my annoyance to a wider audience.

But I want to reiterate that I got no complaint with the execution of the biography. I'm sorry to be casting shade on a decent biographer.

The original version of the essay I handed in was much longer than what was published. I wrote some paragraphs of evidence-gathering from the biography and close reading of the novel, which I include below for your amusement, in case you're a literary nerd like me. I wanted the opportunity to prove that Williams is a mediocre writer at greater length than I had to play with in the published version. They're essentially out of context, but if you've read the essay, you can follow along.

One sentence that I wish my editor hadn't advised me to cut, which is not part of the close reading, but is a more general critique on white male criticism: "Perhaps if I didn’t read every book with the underlying question of do I exist in this narrative?, I wouldn’t notice the substandard roles women tend to play, either." That's the question under everything I read, and it's a profoundly important question at this cultural moment - not just for me, a white woman, but for anyone who's not a cis straight white male.

There's more news from me, but it can wait till next week. Enjoy!

--



In the English Department of the University of Denver, where Williams worked, “Male chauvinism was taken for granted, and affairs, which included sleeping with the students, weren’t worth mentioning except as gossip,” Shields states. Williams had four wives, all of which he married in their twenties (though he continued to get older). Shields writes, “It was Williams’ way to always have a woman in his life—sometimes more than one, never going for long without a female in the background, supporting his efforts.” This is the history of literature, littered with Vera Nabokovs, Sylvia Beaches, and the wives and lovers of Hemingway.

According to Williams, “novels should ‘imitate in form the natural world’; or, as he put it another way, ‘This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens.’” This is exactly the turn of phrase I’ve heard used to describe the work of Stephenie Meyer. It’s “ant writing,” events lined up in a row like marching ants, each following the other mindlessly. E.M. Forster called it story, as opposed to plot, which has causality. Per Forster, “a plot demands intelligence and memory,” while a story does not.

If this doesn’t suffice, let’s turn to the text of Stoner. Williams has a tic of stringing an adjective next to a noun that is its antonym: “frail strength of her slender fingers,” “He felt a distant closeness to her,” “an impersonal thing, belonging to himself alone,” “a curiously reluctant relief” (this phrase, with or without context, ventures on meaninglessness), “Edith’s helpless will.” He also occasionally writes very poor sentences: “Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study.” Such language-level nits are scarcely worth picking in an average novel, but in “a perfect novel”?

And Williams’s weaknesses and prejudices shine through the text. As Stoner’s daughter goes through puberty, “the expression that had once been quietly serene was now either faintly sullen at one extreme or gleeful and animated on the thin edge of hysteria at the other.” A daughter is acceptable when she is a young, pliable companion, but in becoming a sexual being, she grows hysterical. When Stoner cheats on his wife, he tries to insist to himself that he isn’t a cliché, isn’t “a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself...He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar he became. It was not himself that he saw.” So all cheating middle-aged men would like to believe.

I delve and pick like this to prove that Stoner is not a perfect novel. Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer. I don’t begrudge its wide readership (people can enjoy whatever they want, and I admit to a weakness for otherwise mediocre Gothic novels); I begrudge its elevation, when it is so plainly and seriously flawed. The preposterous, rapturous praise, levelled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.

[Take that, NYRB.]