Steve Almond first came to my attention with his sweet book, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. In the fifteen years since then, he’s written about a wide variety of subjects, before coming to this book that is laser-focused on John Williams’ 1965 novel, Stoner. I read Stoner and I found it a very unique book, but Almond has written deeply on every nuance of the book.

This is a slim book, but I would have edited it down a bit more so as to tighten it up, when Almond gets too deep on some topics. But, what the hell do I know, I’ve not published ten books, and maybe my attention’s wanderings were all the state of my head and not Almond’s words. I was still driven forward all through the book.

Stoner is a novel about a writer, his books, and his troubled relationships, especially with women. So, reading Almond’s book, we’re reading a book about a book about a book. Stoner was brought back into print in 2003, and that’s when it came into my world. Stoner’s life is troubled, seriously at times, and many times it becomes obvious that Almond feels a certain kinship to those troubled parts of life. Almond is very candid about some of his own weaknesses in life, and those parts of the book become fascinating for how he treats them.

Allow me to quote writer Pam Houston from the book’s back cover. “The books we love best begin the life-long conversations we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. Gazing into William Stoner with candor, humility, tenderness, his customary wit and an ocean of compassion, Steve Almond finds there, himself, flawed, flayed, but weirdly whole in spite of everything.”

I have thought about all that is going on in this book many times since I finished it. Thought-provoking should be printed all over this book. Almond writes much about masculinity, love, and marriage, as well as writing, teaching, and failure … oh, and death. He writes much about the power of love, not as a tribute to the old Huey Lewis tune, but about how much it matters to so many people.

On a personal note, I suffered from some harsh financial realities from owning an independent bookstore for 22 years with my late wife, but our love for each other, for literature, for our employees, and for uniting our customers with great books, made an unprofitable situation a work of love.

[As some sort of a palette cleanser, I left the testosterone-rich world of Stoner/Williams/Almond to read a large collection of Jane Kenyon’s poetry. That was a most interesting transition.] But still, I find myself thinking about Almond’s words about Williams’ words. This was a truly fascinating book of discovery. ( )

"Literature exists to help people know themselves," Steve Almond tells us early in his new book William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life. Almond delves into John William's novel Stoner and explores how he connected to the character of William Stoner and how the novel impacted his life.

Steve Almond has read Stoner a dozen times, grappling with its messages and why it brings him back time after time. He offers us a Stoner who shows the "devotion to the inner life," a lost art in a culture fixated on wealth and consumerism and entertainment.

I have read Stoner twice. I picked up an ebook on sale because I liked the cover art, a painting by John Singer Sargent. I got the 'Stoner' bug and was soon touting it, part of its rediscovery by readers.

Stoner is the story of a man whose hardscrabble farmer father sends him to university to study agriculture. Stoner is baffled by literature and is moved to understand. His professor understands that Stoner has fallen in love and is destined to become a teacher. The story follows his career, his unhappy marriage, alienation from his daughter, his love affair, and departmental battles. And then--he dies of cancer. In the end, Stoner forgives his wife and himself and accepts that his choices were the only ones he could have made.

The novel breaks the rules for a best-seller, and Williams knew it when he wrote it. From the old-fashioned narration and the lack of page-turning action to the focus on a sad character whose choices bring him pain. And yet...we are carried away by the story. It is about the choices we make and don't make, how we marry for lust and are ruined by lovelessness, how sticking to our values can ruin our careers.

Almond becomes deeply personal, sharing his own decisions and failures and history and how William Stoner reflected his life back to him, helping him to understand himself and better himself.

Almond probes Stoner's wife, making her a more fully realized character for readers--Almond's wife would like to hear Edith's side of the story, how sexual abuse and the lack of choice for women in 1928 caged her into a life she did not want. First Edith gives up their daughter to Stoner's care; later, jealous, she reclaims the child and alienates her from her father. The child suffers but Stoner cannot see any choice but to allow it. The girl is broken by this and it destroys her.

Stoner's squabbles with the English department head, Lomax, shows "the difficulty of standing up for yourself in the world, the price you pay when you fail to do so, and the price you pay when you succeed." Stoner wants to uphold the "intellectual purity of the academy" but feuding with the powerful can't result in victory.

Was Stoner a masochist? Growing up on a farm, was he so used to being the victim of uncontrollable forces that he sought out failure? On his death bed, Stoner's daughter remarks, "things haven't been easy for you, have they?" to which he replies, "I suppose I didn't want them to be."

Almond looks at the theme of class in Stoner. Marrying Edith, a pampered girl from the upper classes and embracing a career as a teacher brings Stoner far up the ladder from the manual labor and subsistence life on his family farm. Almond writes that Stoner "show us what happens when the poor farm boy actually gets the rich girl, which is that he winds up in hell."

During WWI, Stoner's two best friends at university go to war while he is talked out of it by his professor. Stoner is perfectly happy in his cell, searching literature for truth and beauty.

There are a few months of joy in Stoner's life, mostly when he falls in love with Katherine, a young instructor. Sharing the intellectual life leads to carnal love until Lomax holds the affair over Stoner's head to threaten his career. The interlude allows reflections on love--Stoner needing to choose between human love and the love of teaching. And it is teaching that Stoner loves the most, the idealized vision of preserving and passing on the heritage of literature. Over and over he chooses teaching--instead of enlisting, instead of divorcing, instead of a good relationship with his boss. Literature is his first love and Stoner never abandons her.

On his death bed, Stoner asks if his life had value or if he was a failure. Williams wrote that Stoner "had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality." In a flash of insight, Stoner realizes that failure didn't matter. "He was himself, and he knew what he had been." And that is the beauty of the novel. It is enough to be oneself. To stay true to who one is. Nothing else matters in the end. In the battle for the inner life, Stoner had won.

Throughout the book, Almond connects his subject to contemporary American politics, concluding that "Americans are conflict junkies" and when politicians don't fight back we lose interest. "Going high" as Stoner did may win the battle but it loses the fight.

Almond's book was enjoyable for the insights into John William's "perfect novel" and also for a deep understanding of how a novel can impact a reader.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. ( )