Mrs. ‘Stoner’ Speaks: An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams | Hacker News Reader

Mrs. ‘Stoner’ Speaks: An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams

theparisreview.org

27 pointsoverwhelm14 comments

I loved 'Stoner', but wished I could also have read the story from the perspective of Stoner's wife (Edith). We see her as she appeared to Stoner, and it would be easy to write her off with adjectives like uptight, frigid, damaged, belligerent; but from the outside it would probably have been easy to write Stoner off as an inattentive, unfaithful husband pouring his life into profoundly unimportant work and going through an undignified mid-life crisis -- or something similarly reductionist and dehumanising. I bet Edith's inner life was at least as vivid as his, and whether or not her behaviour could be rationalised, her pain was certainly just as real as his. That's part of the genius of the book, though -- Williams shows us enough, and paints even the somewhat neglected characters richly enough, to stimulate these thoughts.

Anyway, this is an interesting interview, but (fortunately for everyone concerned) it gives the impression that Stoner and Edith were not modeled as closely on John and Nancy Williams as I might have guessed. So the title is a bit misleading.

Thank you for posting this. I met the man once--as it happens, over beers. He was pleasant to talk with, for the hour or so. Yet I gather he was pretty good at making enemies.

As for "Mrs. 'Stoner'"--the misogyny in the depiction of Stoner's wife in that novel is breathtaking. Comparing a woman to that character is the sort of offense that deserves ostracism. I am amazed at the title.

[Edit: No, I don't think that the Paris Review means to compary Nancy Gardner Williams to the wife in Stoner; clearly this is short for "Mrs. [the fellow who wrote] 'Stoner'". Still, it is jarring.]

I'm not familiar with the book at all.

It's interesting that you took the misogyny to be breathtaking yet it's not mentioned on the book's wiki page at all despite having a fairly detailed plot "overview".

Do you think the misogyny is breathtaking because of the cultural differences between then and now or is the misogyny a n intentional trait of the main character himself?

She is depicted as a deeply flawed and vindictive character. As a reader, it's easy to hate her and as I was reading it I imagined the author must have hated her too. But there are other women/girls in the story who come off in a much more positive, almost angelic, light so I don't think the author could be accused of misogyny here. Nor the husband in the book - his mariage seems to be something unpleasant that happens to him but he never seems to hold his wife's apparent flaws against her.

> But there are other women/girls in the story who come off in a much more positive, almost angelic, light so I don't think the author could be accused of misogyny here.

I don't think this is the best defence. Maybe 'misogyny' is a dangerously ambiguous word here, but certainly sexist writing can contain positive portrayals of women. You've also got to take into account how much humanity and depth the female characters are invested with, the types of traits they are celebrated or derided for, and so on. (If a book contained only hateful and angelic women, that would be suspiciously reminiscent of the Madonna-whore dichotomy, which is a bit of a wanky phrase but I think has some truth to it.)

I think it would be fair to say that we don't get a full portrait of anyone but Stoner, so the fact that Edith is arguably a bit of a caricature of the broken, bitter woman doesn't necessarily tell us much about Williams's attitude to women generally. And there's enough nuance in her portrayal to leave space for her to be a real person behind the scenes.

Not the person you replied to, and I read the book years ago so the details are fuzzy, but I don't think there's a clear-cut answer to your question. We effectively see everything in the book from Stoner's perspective (although it's written in the third person, grammatically), so there's no clear separation between his perspective and the author's. My feeling was that Edith was hard done by, and I would definitely understand someone seeing her as a misogynistic caricature. But it's hard to generalise: this is Stoner's story, so of course the most nuanced and sympathetic portrayal is of him; and anyway, it is the author who shows us enough to make us feel more than just contempt or pity for Edith, and even to feel frustrated by the superficiality of the portrait he has painted of her.

It's a bad novel, rife with cliche and sentimentalism. There's no space for subtleties such as unreliable/ unpleasant narrators or different points of view or multifaceted personalities. The main characters are, for the whole novel and without any meaningful evolution, the following:

Stoner, the hapless intellectual dreamer;

His wife, the hysterical and capricious ruiner of her husband's life;

Stoner's romantic interest, the sweet, subdued soulmate;

Stoner's (work) rival, cunning and evil.

That's it. The wife's description can be construed as extremely misogynistic, but I'd say it's just painted very naively, as are all the others.

It's a good novel. This is also a good interview, and point of the novel comes out: a portrait of a person as a hero by doing nothing other than being himself.

A novel doesn't need to include morally ambiguous characters to be good. It doesn't have to reproduce the world or the people in it faithfully. It can be impressionistic or allegorical or whatever.

I suppose this is all subjective. Something is only overly sentimental if it failed to make you feel something, which is clearly the case here for you. I don't know why I'm compelled to argue. I suppose because I liked the novel and it made be feel something.

As an observer, with no prior thoughts on the book, I appreciate reading both your thoughts quite a bit.

I think there's great value in considering a thing based off of well-articulated contradictory arguments.

It is a good novel, but flawed, and not I think up to the hype it has received over the last dozen years.

No, a novel doesn't need morally ambiguous characters. However, it does need believable ones, and I think that Edith fails there.

I'd argue that moral ambiguity is necessary if you want to write people believably because all people are morally ambiguous. Either way, I don't think believable characters are necessary.

I recently read a pair of Saramago novels - Blindness and Seeing - that don't contain believable characters. They're all caricatures. The novels still work, and they're still acclaimed.

I have two perspectives on judging the quality of literature:

1. What's important about a novel is its style. Every story has been told so quality is a question of how it is told. Attributes like "realistic characters" or "realistic plot" are meaningless: what matters is the nuts and bolts of how your novel is constructed - from diction to sentence structure to the overarching structure of the whole thing. Keep in mind - I'm not arguing for a universal style guide, I'm arguing that a person's opinions about literature should be based on their opinions about style.

2. Quality is subjective - there's no such thing as a good novel, just a novel that you like. From this perspective, a novel can be said to be good if lots of people liked it over some period of time, but there's no "theory of quality," just the weight of opinions and time.

From this perspective, whether Stoner lives up to the hype is a question of whether the hype endures. We'll see. I wouldn't bet either way but I'm glad of the hype. Without it, I wouldn't have read the novel, and I enjoyed it.

Completely agree, and I was a bit disappointed that the interviewer didn't take the opportunity to ask the author's wife her opinions on the way the wife is depicted in that book. She's such a terrible character, maybe there's no way to politely broach the subject!

Stoner's wife is the novel's antagonist. Clearly she's meant to be viewed somewhat unsympathetically. But Stoner himself made some terrible decisions and seemed willfully ignorant of his wife's discontent. They are complex characters.

I thought this was about some kind of new legal marijuana business or activist.

Fooled me.

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