Up until the end this remained a 4 star read for me. Mostly because it is wildly solipsistic. Stoner is a vivid character, and the quiet intensity with which the prose reflect his stoicism and inner life is accomplished. Everything feels opaque and the inability to connect to anything, especially in the later half, make it an isolating and seemingly lacking work. It’s an intentional, near perfect rendering of a lens able to capture one subject from one, imperfect angle, yet also encapsulates a forever hazy interest in everything around it.

In many ways I felt like I was compiling a list of dings against it, until the end, when I think the final card played shows that every mark against it is the point. His solipsism and his disconnection and his stoicism are facile and detrimental regretfully necessary to asses Stoner’s life. There is enough here to conclude that the sum of his life, without a thumb on the scale, brings subjective conclusions that are unexpectedly interesting. Most of the complaints I’ve seen against the book in reviewers here are all addressed on his last reflections. Understanding that how he perceived and rendered his world—through dispassionate disassociation—facilitated a very sad existence.

But there is also dignity and some measure of grace in his eliding of a “full” life. It’s as much as a warning as it is a compilation of qualities that would benefit people. And I can always sympathize with characters unable to connect with other people well, since I have a similar affliction. It’s something you either “get”, or you don’t. Every single time I read something that captures the deep seeded regret of not being able to communicate or be understood or function socially in a way that would gather people around your hearth, and felt myself rendered there, I have also seen fellow reviewers misunderstand.

People imagine it’s a lack of effort or simply willful ignorance, rather than a difference of how one perceives the world and others, and how, subsequently, a person can navigate it. To me, it’s something like telling someone overweight that they should lose weight, well intentioned or not. Or really addressing any kind of illness with a kind of blase only people without that lived experience can muster.

In the end, Stoner articulates every issue with the narrative himself. His one dimensional perception of other characters renders them as such. There are complexities to his wife and daughter and every other human that are significant and out of reach. He characterizes it, at one point, as ignorance. And it is a kind of ignorance, I suppose. But one thing we get out of this as a reader that Stoner does not, is that his composition was there from birth. He struggles against the definition of himself all the way, and sometimes manages to succeed at real change. But he is a person not well made for the society constructed around him.

I find myself having more than enough sympathy and empathy with that. My complaints about Stoner as a book fit the man rendered here too a tee—and he knows it. He’s said as much.