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The New York Times Book Review last Sunday ran a q & a with the editors of the Norton Anthology, that brick of a book we all lugged around during high school and college. This was the last question:

Why study literature?

M.H. Abrams: Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human….

I savored this answer, because I’d been struggling to write a post about “Stoner,” by John Williams, originally published in 1965, reissued in 2006, handsomely, by New York Review Books.

Difficult to get into, by the end this novel is hard to give up. In between, it’s heart wrenching.

My friend Cynthia Cole pressed this book into my hands as I was leaving Pythonga. “Isaac hated it — said it had no hook — but I loved it.” I had no other book with me for the plane ride home, so I dug in, trusting Cynthia’s taste.

It’s a slog getting through the first few chapters, about farm life, academia, and William Stoner’s choice to sign up or stay home during World War 1. Stoner — who lives from 1898 through 1956 — discovers literature as a University of Missouri student, and stays there to pursue an academic career.

With Stoner’s disastrous choice of a wife this story comes to life.

Edith is beautiful but neurotic, and frigid; their sexual encounters are almost unbearable to read. When she gives birth to their only child, Edith ignores the baby and Stoner.

Stoner marvels at his feelings for Grace, the little girl; he feels like it’s the first time his love has been reciprocated. He doesn’t mind that his wife has taken to bed; the house is orderly and loving with Edith uninvolved. Grace spends her afternoons in her father’s study at a small desk, drawing, as he grades papers. Theirs is a quiet, sweet bond.

One day, Edith decides she will be a mother to the girl. It’s a brutal scene; she wrenches the girl from Stoner’s warm study and takes her shopping for frilly clothes. This is the beginning of the end for Grace, who will be overdressed and forced by her mother to be a popular teenager. Popular how?  Booze and sex. Grace purposely gets pregnant in college and marries the baby’s father to escape her parents’ home.  A heavy drinker, Grace comes back to taunt Stoner as he ages.

Ouch.

Stoner’s academic life brings him both misery and joy, in the same seminar. One of his students falls in love with him; another hijacks the seminar and paints Stoner as an unfeeling, vindictive, out-of-touch academic. The love affair is the one joy of Stoner’s life. But his rigidity with the disruptive student causes the affair to be discovered, and destroyed.

This is the life story of one man in one place and time in America; it’s a smart and moving read. The passages that described his love for his daughter, and his love for his lover, and his love for literature uplifted Stoner, and me.