Stoner has been reviewed all over, including on Goodreads, as “the perfect novel.” If that’s the case, literature as we know it is dead. This is what passes for “literary fiction” today. At best, it’s a lukewarm defense of gray, nihilistic averageness.
The protagonist, if he can be called that, is a young man raised on his parents’ farm in Central Missouri in the 1910s. He abandons his parents to go to college at the University of Missouri in Columbia, ostensibly to study soil science. He gives that up for a degree in English literature and returns to the farm only sporadically to visit his parents. He foregoes military service in World War I to become a university instructor. He is a disappointment to himself and everyone around him. He marries and lives a loveless marriage until he divorces. He has an affair, but that brings no joy or meaning. He grows old in a meaningless life and career at the university, achieving no glory, no plaudits, and receives no admiration from his peers or his students. Trivial things happen, and the story ends with Stoner no wiser or happier.
Rather than “celebrating stoicism,” this story is a depressing, searing indictment of humanism.
Steven Vickers Books 
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