Slower than its own legend.

Nobody read this for forty years, then everybody did, and the story of that revival has grown slightly larger than the novel attached to it. Rediscovered, passed hand to hand, made into a European bestseller by word of mouth — described everywhere as the most beautiful book you have never heard of. That's a wonderful narrative and it sets a reader up to be disappointed, which is roughly what happened to me for the first half.

What it does superbly is institutional cruelty. Those department politics are the best I've encountered anywhere. Lomax and the graduate student, a vendetta conducted entirely through timetabling and committee membership, decades of it, no raised voices at any point. Anyone who has worked inside a hierarchy will recognise the particular horror of being destroyed slowly by a colleague who remains always technically within the rules. That material alone justifies the entry price.

Where I part company with its admirers is Edith. She isn't a character; she's a weather system that happens to Stoner. Her cruelty arrives fully formed, gets no explanation, and is granted no interiority whatsoever, and the novel appears entirely comfortable with that arrangement. One paragraph gestures at her upbringing and the repression inside it, and that is the only door the book ever opens. A friend of mine argues that this is deliberate, that we're locked inside Stoner's perception and he genuinely doesn't understand his wife, and that we're being shown the limits of the man doing the seeing. I've thought about her reading a great deal. I think it's generous towards something that behaves more like a gap.

The daughter is the real tragedy in all this and receives a fraction of the attention the affair does. Grace is destroyed by the marriage she grows up inside, and the prose registers it in half a dozen devastating sentences before returning to her father's disappointments. Why does that keep happening? He notices her and then he doesn't.

The affair with Katherine is where the thing finally warms up, and I'll concede that the last quarter operates on a different level from everything preceding it. The scene where he returns to teaching after it ends. The way a classroom becomes the only place he is fully alive. Then the final pages, with the book in his hands. I'd been resisting this novel for most of its length and it got me anyway, in an armchair, at one in the morning.

So seven. A great novel about work, an evasive one about marriage, and a book better served if people stopped introducing it as a masterpiece and let readers find it for themselves. My copy has a wine ring on it now, which the previous owner would have hated.