I don’t know what it is about Stoner. Fred Stenson alerted me to it, on a recommendation from his friend Greg Axelson in Cochrane. And really, in some ways the novel is stylistically really flat – more summary than narrative. And there are these odd descriptions – paradoxical, contradictory. On their wedding night, for example, Stoner reaches for Edith and feels “a distant closeness to her”. What could a distant closeness be?

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