Stoner: the must-read novel of 2013

On 13 June 1963, the American novelist John Williams wrote from the University of Denver, where he was a professor of English, to his agent Marie Rodell. She had just read his third novel, Stoner, and while clearly admiring it, was also warning him not to get his hopes up. Williams replied: "I suspect that I agree with you about the commercial possibilities; but I also suspect that the novel may surprise us in this respect. Oh, I have no illusions that it will be a 'bestseller' or anything like that; but if it is handled right (there's always that out) – that is, if it is not treated as just another 'academic novel' by the publisher, as Butcher's Crossing [his second novel] was treated as a "western", it might have a respectable sale. The only thing I'm sure of is that it's a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one."

How familiar the thought, and the tone, of this will be to almost every practising novelist. The expression of confidence in your own work, without which you would never have started; the wariness in the face of the bitch goddess Success; the caution in raising expectation, but the further caution in not raising it too high; and, finally, the writer's everlasting "out" – that if it all goes wrong, it's probably someone else's fault.

Stoner was published in 1965, and – as is usually the case – it steered a mid‑course between the novelist's fears and his hopes. It was respectably reviewed; it had a reasonable sale; it did not become a bestseller; it went out of print. In 1972, Augustus, Williams's "Roman" novel, won half the National Book Award for fiction (the other half going to John Barth's Chimera). It was his largest moment of public success, yet he did not even attend the ceremony; perhaps he was rightly suspicious, as the laudatum pronounced in his absence was strangely disparaging. When he died, two decades later, without publishing any more fiction, the New York Times obituarist treated him as much as a poet and "educator" as a novelist. But still to come was that factor – identified by Williams in his letter – that novelists often write about, that they fear, but also place their trust in: time. And time has vindicated him way beyond his own modest hope. Fifty years after Williams wrote to his agent, Stoner became a bestseller. A quite unexpected bestseller. A bestseller across Europe. A bestseller publishers themselves could not quite understand. A bestseller of the purest kind – one caused almost entirely by word-of-mouth among readers.

I remember unwrapping my copy of the novel back in March. Like many writers, I get sent far more books than I can possibly read, and the process of triage can be brutal. So: a new paperback (from my own publishers) with a large front-cover strap reading "VINTAGE WILLIAMS". No Christian name. Raymond Williams? William Carlos Williams? Rowan Williams? Check the spine: John Williams. The classical guitarist? The composer of film music? Neither. Rather, a novel published in the 60s by a dead American I'd never heard of. And then the title: Stoner. Hmmm: were we in for some tranced and tedious discussion of the merits of Moroccan versus Colombian gold? But there was an introduction (and therefore a recommendation) by John McGahern, so it got the first-page test. And Stoner turned out to be the name of the main character, which was a relief. And the prose was clean and quiet; and the tone a little wry. And the first page led to the second, and then what happened was that joyful internal word-of-mouth that sends a reader hurrying from one page to the next; which in turn leads to external word-of-mouth, the pressing of the book on friends, the ordering and sending of copies.

William Stoner, we learn in the book's first paragraph, was a lifelong academic, who entered the University of Missouri as a student in 1910, and went on to teach there until his death in 1956. The value and purpose of academe is a key concern of the novel, while one of its main sequences describes a long and savage piece of departmental infighting. So Williams was perhaps a little naive, or at least over-hopeful, in thinking his novel wouldn't, or shouldn't, be labelled "academic". In the same way, Butcher's Crossing (to be reissued by Vintage in January) is indeed a "western", being set in a Kansas frontier town in the 1870s, with its main action a buffalo hunt in a lost mountain valley as winter approaches. It is so historically and anatomically precise, I am confident that, if you gave me a sharp knife, a horse and a rope, I could now skin a buffalo (though someone else would have to kill it first). Butcher's Crossing is a very good "western", as Stoner is a very good "academic novel" – and, in each case, being "very good" means that the novels slip their identifying tag.

Stoner is a farm boy, initially studying agriculture and a requirement of his course is to take a class in English literature. The students are set two Shakespeare plays, and then some sonnets, including the 73rd. Asked to elucidate the poem by an impatient and sardonic professor, Stoner finds himself tongue-tied and embarrassed, unable to say more than "It means … it means …" And yet, something has happened within him: an epiphany rooted less in a moment of understanding than of not understanding. He has realised that there is something out there which, if he can seize it, will unlock not just literature but life itself; and in advance of such future understanding, he already feels his humanity awakened, and a new kinship with those around him. His life will change utterly from this moment: he will discover "a sense of wonder" at grammar, and grasp how literature changes the world even as it describes it. He becomes a teacher,"which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man". Towards the end of his life, when he has endured many disappointments, he thinks of academe as "the only life that had not betrayed him". And he understands also that there is a continual battle between the academy and the world: the academy must keep the world, and its values, out for as long as possible.

Stoner is a son of the soil – patient, earnest and enduring – who moves unprepared into the city and the world. Williams is wonderful at human awkwardness, at physical and emotional shyness, at not speaking your mind or your heart, either because you cannot articulate them, or because you simply cannot follow what has happened, or both:

And so, like many others, their
honeymoon was a failure; yet
they would not admit this to
themselves, and they did not
realise the significance of the
failure until long afterward.

Good things do happen in Stoner's life, but they all end badly. He relishes teaching students, but his career is stymied by a malevolent head of department; he falls in love and marries, but knows within a month that the relationship is a failure; he adores his daughter, but she is turned against him; he is given sudden new life by an affair, but finds love vulnerable to outside interference, just as the academy is vulnerable to the world. Aged 42, he reflects that "he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember".

Though he is allowed small victories towards the end of the novel, they are pyrrhic ones. The pains of lost and thwarted love have tested Stoner's reserves of stoicism to the full; and you might well conclude that his life must be accounted pretty much a failure. But, if so, you would not have Williams on your side. In one of his rare interviews, he commented of his protagonist: "I think he's a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing … The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job … a job in the good and honourable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was."

Writers often disagree with readers about the emphasis of their work. Even so, it's a surprise that Williams seems surprised that others might find Stoner's life "sad". He himself was more than aware of its likely effect. In that letter to Rodell, he writes: "One afternoon a few weeks ago, I walked in on my typist (a junior history major, and pretty average, I'm afraid) while she was finishing typing chapter 15, and discovered great huge tears coursing down her cheeks. I shall love her for ever."

The sadness of Stoner is of its own particular kind. It is not, say, the operatic sadness of The Good Soldier, or the grindingly sociological sadness of New Grub Street. It feels a purer, less literary kind, closer to life's true sadness. As a reader, you can see it coming in the way you can often see life's sadness coming, knowing there is little you can do about it. Except – since you are a reader – you can at least defer it. I found that when reading Stoner for the first time, I would limit myself most days to 30 or 40 pages, preferring to put off until the morrow knowledge of what Stoner might next have to bear.

The title – suggested by his American publishers – remains unexciting (though better, probably, than Williams's first attempts: A Flaw of Light and The Matter of Love). Still, a book makes its title, rather than the other way round. And what the book has turned into is more than one more forgotten work gratifyingly exhumed. When a novel by, say, Henry Green or Patrick Hamilton is "rediscovered", the graph of sales usually forms a brief, respectable hump before returning again to the horizontal. Stoner first went into Vintage in 2003, after McGahern had recommended it to the publisher Robin Robertson. In the decade up to 2012, it sold 4,863 copies, and by the end of last year was trundling along in print-on-demand. This year, up to the end of November, it has sold 164,000 copies, with the vast majority – 144,000 of them – coming since June.

It was the novel's sudden success in France in 2011 that alerted other publishers to its possibilities; since then it has sold 200,000 copies in Holland and 80,000 in Italy. It has been a bestseller in Israel, and is just beginning to take off in Germany. Though Williams died in 1994, his widow is, happily, still alive to enjoy the worldwide royalties. Rights have now been sold in 21 countries, and Stoner is soon to be launched on China.

There is a further oddity about the revival of Stoner: it seems to be a purely European (and Israeli) phenomenon so far. Bret Easton Ellis has tweeted its praise, and Tom Hanks has applauded it, but these have been rare American voices in its favour. When I asked around among my American literary friends, some had simply never heard of the novel, nor of Williams, and others were lukewarm in their response. Lorrie Moore's praise was carefully qualified: "Stoner is such an interesting phenomenon. It is a terrific and terrifically sad little book, but the way it has taken off in the UK is a bit of a head-scratcher for most American writers, who find it lovely, flawed, engagingly written, and minor rather than great."

This disparity needs some explanation, and I'm not sure I can supply it. Perhaps Europeans are more open to the quietness of the novel than Americans. Perhaps Americans have read more novels that resemble Stoner than we have (though what they might be I can't think). Perhaps American readers don't like its lack of "optimism" (there is no shortage of pessimism in American literature, but the national character is one of striving, of altering circumstances, rather than accepting them). Or perhaps they are merely lagging behind us, and will soon catch up. When I put these points to the novelist Sylvia Brownrigg, she responded: "The reticence seems very not American to me. In spite of the American setting, the character himself feels more English, or European – opaque, fundamentally decent,and passive … Perhaps the lack of the novel's taking hold in the US is because it doesn't feel like One of Ours? We're such a country of maximalists, noisy ones, and though obviously there are exceptions, even our minimalists are not spare and sad in this particular way … Another thought crossed my mind: that there is little drinking in Stoner. I wonder if American characters who are self-contained and stoical (I am thinking of Carver, or Richard Yates) more often have to be alcoholics to rein themselves in, and accept their disappointments."

Whatever the reasons for its cooler reception in the US, I don't agree that the novel is "minor"; nor do I think it is "great" in the way that, say, Gatsby or Updike's Rabbit quartet are great. I think Williams himself got it right: it is "substantially good". It is good, and it has considerable substance, and gravity, and continuation in the mind afterwards. And it is a true "reader's novel", in the sense that its narrative reinforces the very value of reading and study. Many will be reminded of their own lectoral epiphanies, of those moments when the magic of literature first made some kind of distant sense, first suggested that this might be the best way of understanding life. And readers are also aware that this sacred inner space, in which reading and ruminating and being oneself happen, is increasingly threatened by what Stoner refers to as "the world" – which is nowadays full of hectic interference with, and constant surveillance of, the individual. Perhaps something of this anxiety lies behind the renaissance of the novel. But you should – indeed must – find out for yourself.