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

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/20/mrs-stoner-speaks-an-interview-with-nancy-gardner-williams/

by overwhelm • 7 years ago

27 14 7 years ago

cafard2• 7 years ago

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.]

klank2• 7 years ago

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?

sillypog2• 7 years ago

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.

retsibsi3• 7 years ago

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.

Udik• 7 years ago

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.

sillypog2• 7 years ago

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!

cgh• 7 years ago

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.

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

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

Fooled me.

retsibsi3• 7 years ago

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.

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

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