Eric Maas’s Reviews > Stoner > Status Update

What did you expect?

…in the soft light of late afternoon her face seemed young and unlined. If i had been stronger, he thought; if I had known more; if I could have understood. And finally, mercilessly, he thought: if I had lived her more. As if it were a long distance it had to go, his hand moved across the sheet that covered him and touched her hand. She didn’t move;…

16. Retirement
’My God, Bill,’ Finch said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love .

Stoner came to realize that she was […] almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink .

15. Gracie expecting, marrying the poor sod because Edith ‘s decided after overcoming her initial hysteric shock, leaves for St. Louis and is being widowed because the sod goes off to fight Japan…

Slightly confused that Stoner doesn’t draw a line here like with Walker and Lomax; Edith is so obviously wrong with her radical, all too forward solution. Still, with her, Stoner complies…

14. Older, saddened, but not beaten just yet

It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.