Stoner: A man of constant sorrow

John Williams's Stoner (1965) continues to blow me away, one of the most beautifully written and sorrowful novels I've read in years and why it's not recognized as a classic, who can say? Aside from the self-effacing life of the author? _ perhaps the academic setting in a MidWest U in the first half of the 20th century makes the novel feel a little unapproachable. True, many of its readers and devotees would be English majors - who else reads classic novels, anyway? - so we wouldn't be put off by the occasional long scene about presentations at a graduate seminar - at least I wasn't - though I recognize that many readers would skim through those sections. But there's so much more - the 100 pp. or so I read last night detail the joy Stoner takes in his small, tentative way when he realizes that maybe he could be a good teacher, his quiet pleasure in raising his daughter who's more or less ignored by her strange and distant mother. But Stoner is, at least thus far, a man of constant sorrow: it is painful to watch as his wife - returning from a few months at her childhood home in St. Louis following her father's suicide (his depression-era bank folded because of his incompetence) engages in a battle for the child's affections, trying to turn her against her loving father. And then Stoner, just gaining confidence in his teaching, crosses paths with a malevolent graduate student, perhaps doing the bidding of a faculty rival (you know what they say about faculty politics - so vicious bcz the stakes are so low). Friend WS wonders if all great literature arises from sorrow and sadness, to which the answer is, no, there is a whole comic/triumphant side to literature as well of course - but all great literature involves some kind of conflict or collision of forces, in classical terms it involves an action, so I suppose there are sorrowful elements, sometimes overcome, in all great literature. Stoner has the potential to be a novel of Job-like suffering, a good man tested for no evident reason - and its value will finally rest in part on how and whether Stoner, truly an Everyman, finds his place in the world - whether he suffers through his marriage, ends it, changes it in some way, changes her in some way. Although this is Stoner's novel, his wife Edith is the antagonist and it's easy, too easy, to loathe her - but Williams has slyly introduced some plot information that may explain her frigidity and her anger: It's just hinted (and this was not a topic in 1965 the way it is today) that she was a victim of childhood abuse, probably from her father: In the weeks after his funeral, she incinerates everything he ever gave her. Against this kind of rage and this damage, what chance does she have? Or Stoner?