Quiet desperation

How many years ago did I buy Stoner--two, three? It was at some point when the Powell's on Lincoln was still in operation. All I knew about the novel then was that it was set in Missouri--at the University of Missouri, as a matter of fact. So I kept meaning to read while on a trip to Missouri. But that never worked out. Nonetheless, it stayed near the top of my to-read pile and was never very far from my consciousness.

So when mentions of it popped up earlier this year, I took notice. The last straw was this map of the "Best Book for Every State". It's absolutely perverse in its amnesiac contrarianness (as I told the friend who posted it, "How can I take seriously a list of American literary greats which doesn't include either Twain or Faulkner?")--plus the inclusion of an entry for New York City separate from New York State is simply trolling--but there had to be some there there. And I wasn't the only person in my circle to notice all the hype. When I needed help interpreting a puzzling line, I turned to my best-read colleague, who admitted to giving in as well and reading it earlier this year. "Why is this fifty year-old book getting so much attention now?" she asked, and I had no answer for her.

One of the blurbs on the back of the Modern Library edition calls it "a perfect novel". I'm not sure what prompted this judgment apart from the way in which it very neatly comprises the arc of one man's life. Other characters appear (and I can't agree with McGahern's forward in which he praises how fully developed each of them is) but the focus remains firmly on the protagonist and everyone else is clearly depicted from his point-of-view. It starts with an unpromisingly modest assessment of this life, but I quickly knew that this wasn't a book I was going to find hard to finish.

In retrospect, I felt the novel was at its best when depicted the disastrous marriage between Stoner, a real son of the soil, and his neurotic bourgeois bride. The tragic collision of two horribly shy people who seize each other with desperation, clueless to how fundamentally unsuited they are to each other, was riveting. So was, for different reasons, the implacable feud which develops between Stoner and the incoming department head. I had to steel myself against reading the book in bed, and I know that at least one night it contributed to my insomnia. Not since Shalimar the Clown, I think, or The true history of the Kelly Gang have I felt such fury while reading nonfiction.

But I'm absolutely mystified how McGahern can term Lomax, Stoner's colleague, "the most complex" of Williams' "brilliant portraits". He's considerably less developed than Stoner's daughter, let alone his wife, and at times seems (like Stoner's oldest friend Finch) creakingly close to being a plot device. I feel like there must've been some mid-century stereotype of the physically disabled that's simply inaccessible to us now. McGahern doesn't even attempt to make such a case for Stoner's "little coed", who reads way too much like the author's attempt to rationalise his own mid-life infidelities. (The breakup conversation where she agrees completely with Stoner's summation of their relationship and absolves him entirely for choosing his work over her is particularly embarrassing.)

In the end, it feels like a story with limited ambitions that fulfills them abundantly; a great small novel. I'm not surprised it held so much resonance for me given the parallels to my own biography (I shudder to think what might've become of my mother if she'd been born a generation or two earlier and hadn't had her career) and its academic setting (what my colleague suspects is the real reason for its current fame). Now we'll see if I can find the same in the work of a gay man of monshu's generation.