Stoner

To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish

“[T]he mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”

— Henry David Thoreau

“To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.”

— William Blake

“Lust and learning… that’s really all there is, isn’t it?”

— Katherine Driscoll, Stoner

WARNING: SPOILIERS

Stoner is a poignant read. Like its protagonist, its style is unassuming. Its power is in its form. A delicate tale strung taut across the span of its protagonist’s life, occasionally thawing into a cutting insight or a devastating flourish. Its tension lies beneath its surface, where a thick emotional undergrowth chokes and sighs.

But it is its form, and in particular its pacing, that’s ultimately terrifying. As though you are reading across polished ice, gliding gently and irrevocably from birth to death, grasping occasionally for grooves and fractures in its surface, unable to still the drumbeat of time. This cadence would be relentless if relentless weren’t too kinetic a word for such a demure tale and stoic protagonist as William Stoner. Stoner has been called a perfect novel and I understand why. It’s perfect in its form, like clockwork. There is an incredible restraint in the way we are propelled from our hero’s childhood through his life until his death.¹ It’s terrifying that within a few hundred pages you can stuff the entirety of a man’s life. All the tragedy of deaths and career anxiety and failed marriage and the tribulations of parenthood, as well as the sweet soaring heights of true love. A man’s life in the palm of your hands. Unread, then read. Born then dead. Is that all there is? Sent off to study, to graduate, to work, to marry, to father, to love, to die. Is that really all there is? Yes, that’s all there is.

Stoner has little agency in this flow. He is sent to study. He is impressed into literature. He is guided towards post-graduate work at the university. He gets married where his wife wants. They have their child only once she suggests it after three years of marriage. He is buffeted by her every whim: he gets a house she wants they can’t afford, she keeps him from his daughter. He doesn’t go to war. As men of his generation are killed in war or kill themselves after financial ruin, he endures in his university outpost until he dies. He does have an affair, but his lover — shy herself — is the one who bids him over and basically clunks him over the head to initiate. This lack of agency is at the core of this tale.

There are moments this lack of agency is almost painful. Why doesn’t Stoner grasp at his daughter tighter? Why doesn’t he reach out to his lover, years after their affair, when it’s clear she hasn’t moved on — he sees she dedicates her book to him. Or why doesn’t he elope with her, his true love? He claims it is not from the disgrace and hardships that would befall them, in him leaving his wife and daughter. He cannot elope because it would be “the destruction of ourselves, of what we do.” Stoner cannot imagine a re-creation of who they are. He can only imagine their present condition. Because he has no agency, he cannot will into being a new future with his beloved. He will let this love pass in the same way that all things pass. He will bear its passing as he bore all his suffering to date. He is a worm that suffers the sun and the dirt to burrow in the soil before him. He cannot will himself into a butterfly.

Maybe there is some deeper American Calvinist claim to be made here about pre-determination. Stoner is not the American frontiersman, carving out a place in the New World. He is what came after. A settler who accepts his lot as it is. He is an academic by temperament: coddled from the storms of the real world, low energy, masticating on irrelevant threads of knowledge from centuries past. Yet he is not a total weakling — he refuses to supplicate to belligerent colleagues. Beneath the passivity lies the quiet strength of the early American.

“Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”

One reviewer proclaimed Stoner an ode to the bugman. If The Power Broker is the story of an indomitable will that bends the world to itself and crushes those underfoot, Stoner is its counterpoint, the tale of a man crushed underfoot.

Stoic is a popular description of Stoner, but it isn’t quite right. His is a deeply protestant posture. His farmer parents worked their plot of land for a lifetime for nothing to come of it and die. This is the land of the strong, quiet type. In this deeply Anglo-Protestant world, there is very little interpersonal warmth and most is left unsaid. And it is in the moments of connection, or of attempted connection, that life explodes. Stoner’s wife throws up the first time they make love. Years of grim endurance ensue. But when Stoner finds love with a younger colleague, the beauty in the world emerges. Stoner finds a deep, enduring bond with his young daughter — until she is taken away from him by his wife. And that breaks something within him and within his daughter. When Stoner becomes a literary professor, his connection with his parents breaks; he suddenly finds they have nothing to say to one another. Relationships are rare and brittle but are the stuff of life — or of inner death.

There is tremendous power in Williams’ portrayal of the heartrending stuff of life within his restrained style and narrative. The suffocating constriction of a bad spouse. The impotent misery of watching a daughter implode with bad choices. The malice of inexplicable rivals. These are the vicissitudes of life and Stoner bears them like a tempest. For in many respects they are as impersonal as a hurricane and there is nothing to do but bear them.

To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish. To each man his life is all there is. The tyranny of his wife might just be one household affair amongst many, but to him it is a daily oppression.² In the “graceful curve” of a lover’s neck is all the beauty in the universe. An inter-departmental scuffle over a student admission is the thrust and parry of a man’s career. These are not the stakes of the World Wars and depressions that raged over his lifetime. But they were the issues that defined his working life. Such is the human condition.³ To dismiss the small things that define our lives is to dismiss them all. This is Stoner. The suffering and joy of an everyman played out in miniature, with the seriousness and poignancy that each of our small, barely noticeable, and soon-to-be-forgotten lives deserve.

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Recommended links (things I’ve been enjoying)

1. John Collison, Marc Andreessen and Charlie Songhurst have a cheeky pint. Self-recommending, but I’ve been chewing on this arrow of AI progress a lot lately:

what I believe is happening with AI, which is the individuals get it first, adopt it first. The small businesses adopt it second, the big businesses get it third, and the government gets it forth

2. Grim reading:

The final blow came in March 2025 when the rest of the Willandra Lakes collection, 106 fossilized individuals, was buried in an unmarked grave, despite a last-minute legal appeal from Gary Pappin, a local Mutthi Mutthi man, and efforts by archaeologist Michael Westaway, who compared it to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. As of this year, Australia’s human fossil record, as well as the biological history of many extinct contact-era populations, has been effectively erased.

This is what it was like for China to burn knowledge of ship building in the 15th century.

3. Andrej Karpathy interviewed by Dwarkesh — calibrating our moment. Love this:

I did some AI consulting for computer vision. A lot of times, the value that I brought to the company was telling them not to use AI. I was the AI expert, and they described the problem, and I said, “Don’t use AI.” This is my value add.

1. It’s been twenty years since I read it, but it reminded me of Remains of the Day (which I loved as a teen). A kind of restrained elegance.

2. Welcome to hell:

Upon the most trivial provocation she wept forlornly and wandered through the rooms; Stoner looked at her impassively and murmured a few absent words of sympathy. She locked herself in her room and did not emerge for hours at a time; Stoner prepared the meals that she would otherwise have prepared and didn’t seem to have noticed her absence when she finally emerged from her room, pale and hollow of cheek and eye. She derided him upon the slightest occasion, and he hardly seemed to hear her; she screamed imprecations upon him, and he listened with polite interest. When he was immersed in a book, she chose that moment to go into the living room and pound with frenzy upon the piano that she seldom otherwise played; and when he spoke quietly to his daughter, Edith would burst into anger at either or both of them.

3. An example, too distracting for the main body, but perhaps worthy for footnote enjoyers: in the late 19th century the German Jewish tycoons were treated with great civility by the Kaiser. But their acceptance into polite society only went so far; invitations to the palace were never extended to their wives. This rankled. We are all defined by the small things.