book; one can only reread it.” Literary
fiction, by definition, must exhibit the
depth to sustain multiple readings.
My initial, idealistic readings of
Stoner quickly gave way to darker
themes. Stoner, for instance, is dragged
into a bitter dispute that derails his aca-
demic career. As a headstrong young
author, I too found myself embroiled in
rows with various agents, editors, and
publishers. And so I read the novel as
a study in human conflict, the ways in
which Stoner unwittingly stokes his
feuds, seeks to defend himself, and
struggles to accept the limits of his
power in the world.
When I was single, I regarded Stoner’s
unhappy marriage as little more than
proof of his stoic martyrdom. Later, a
few years into my own marriage, I could
see that Stoner was about something far
more profound: the doom that awaits all
couples who cannot find a common lan-
guage to express their fears and desires.
Likewise, the moment I became a
father I began to see Stoner as a grim
parable about parenthood. Edith
Stoner comes to her role as a mother
having absorbed the abuse of her own
parents, and she inflicts this abuse on
her daughter, Grace. Her husband is
too inhibited to protect Grace, and he
watche s, i n si lent agony, a s h is daughter
descends into anguish and alcoholism.
That silent agony is shared by most
readers. As should be clear by now,
Stoner is not an easy book to read, par-
ticularly because its hero does so little
to defend himself.
“Poor Daddy,” his daughter ob-
serves, as he lies dying, “things haven’t
been easy for you, have they?”
“No,” Stoner responds. “But I sup-
posed I didn’t want them to be.”
It’s a line that has echoed louder the
older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come
to see the ways in which we conspire
against ourselves. We pretend that our
central desire is always the pursuit of
happiness. But Stoner has no precedent
for the joy he finds in literature and
teaching, because his childhoodprepared him only for a life of agricul-
tural servitude. He has to make things
hard for himself.
That sounds depressing. But our fa-
vor ite novels — t he one s t hat s u st a i n u s —
are the ones that speak, with the most
tender precision, to our own struggles.
As he drifts toward his final sleep,
Stoner sees how pitiful his life must
seem to others. But unexpectedly our
hero awakens to find that a strange
euphoria has suffused his perishing
body. He dimly recalls “that he had
been thinking of failure—as if it mat-
tered. It seemed to him now that such
t hought s were mea n, u nwor t hy of what
his life had been.”
That may sound like a small triumph
given all the hardship that precedes it.
But this moment of transcendent grace
is the reason I keep picking up Stoner,
even twenty-five years later. Our favor-
ite novels don’t just help us understand
our lives. They are the path by which
we travel in difficult truth toward an
elusive mercy.the literary life MANUALS FOR LIVINGSEPT OCT 2019 28