My friends are turning 30 and I want to buy them Stoner

    This year, four of my closest friends are turning 30.

    Their birthdays are in June, August, October, and November.  The first person in my "batch" to hit the milestone is my longtime work-wife, the first friend I made in New York. Then, one of my performer friends, who plans to move to LA after their birthday. My two best friends from college will bring up the rear, weeks apart. Then it will be Christmas.

  I'm planning four parties. I definitely have a complex. My friends and family always make a big deal out of my birthday and I've never even turned 30. From what I understand, it's a Big Deal. It's half the title and all the plot of 13 Going on 30. My main thrill is making a big deal out of everything, so 2022 has enormous potential. Planning a party is just plotting and scheming, but for good, nice reasons, and cake.

    Every tab in my birthday planning spreadsheet has the same thing as its first entry, and it's not even party-related: BUY STONER. My friends are turning 30, and I want to throw them parties, but I also want to give them all this book. Stoner is a 1965 novel by John Williams that isn't about weed, or rocks, or any of the things I would've assumed it was about had I given it any consideration before reading it. I hadn't! Before I read Stoner, I had not thought about it in any meaningful capacity, but I had seen, in the course of my reading life, writers I loved calling it the best novel of all time and the most wonderful book in the world. It ended up on a workshop reading list, and soon I was inducted into the order of Stoner, too.

    Stoner is a hard sell. I have the NYRB edition of the book that features a somber portrait of a nondescript middle-aged man on the cover, though a cursory search indicates that most English editions of Stoner feature somber, nondescript, middle-aged men prominently in their cover design. That's what the book is about, of course: a somber, nondescript, middle-aged man, trying and failing and being disappointed and living with it. In recent years I've tried to pull back from recommending Sad Man Books – I like them, which is nobody's problem but mine – but as every blurb on the back and inside cover of the NYRB printing testifies, William Stoner is no ordinary Sad Man.

    Here's what happens in the book: a boy, William Stoner, is born on a farm in 1891. He's poor, and his family is poor, and they work hard every day. Eventually, circumstances arrange themselves so Stoner can attend college at the University of Missouri, and he enrolls in the agricultural school. But he has an epiphany in a literature class and chooses instead to dedicate his life to literature. Stoner falls in love with and marries a woman who never loves him back. He has one daughter, whom he adores, and who becomes estranged from him. He makes a professional enemy who stymies his career. He has an affair that ends abruptly because of that enemy. He publishes one book and never finishes his second, and he has one friend. Then he dies.

    A hard sell, because really, it's not bleak. It's the most beautiful, fortifying story. It made me happy to be alive. There's alchemy on the page that I can't hope to explain, and that the varied blurbers on the back cover admit they can't articulate, which turns this man's imagined life into a prayer of its own. I love Cliff's Notes but Stoner makes a case for reading the damn book. In his introduction to the NYRB edition, John McGahern says the "passion of the writing" in Stoner is "masked by coolness and clarity of intelligence." Here's the thing, though: McGahern is quoting the book he's introducing with those phrases. He's quoting Stoner's response to the book written by his ex-lover. This is to say, this book is so driven by love, no simplicity or efficiency of its prose can mask it. 

    Here's what the book is about, for me: it's about failure, and disappointment, and joy. None of those things repel or replace each other. Only a few things Stoner hopes for come to pass and all of them hurt him when they do. He loves so deeply in the face of death, hate, anger and fear. It's also a book about writing and language. When he has his epiphany in a literature seminar, Stoner is just a young adult going through the motions of a life he was given. And then the light hits him just right and he is changed. There's no heroic journey or mission. The world doesn't change because Stoner has his revelation, but he changes. He changes. The change makes him a writer. Language turns from a tool into something that can make up a whole life. That is enough.

    Turning 30 carries emotional and social weight, and certainly for my age cohort, the last of the young millennials. If I wanted to pitch Stoner from a cynical, self-aggrandizing generational angle, I would say "it's about a guy who doesn't want to go to college but he has to go to college and then he changes his major and gets a low-paying job and he has a bad marriage and he dies." But I don't want to do that; it's inauthentic. Stoner is not a book about overcoming adversity or dwelling in it. It is a story about failing into yourself. What I want to do is buy four copies of Stoner, and give them to my friends. Maybe I am leaning on the guilt of gifted books, to make sure they are read, but I think the end justifies the means. It is the easiest, clearest way that I can say I will love you this much even when it's not like this. Probably I will love you more.

    The parties are parties, but also they are cover. They are a spectacle to distract from how sentimental I am getting, watching these friends grow up, and become more themselves. We've known and loved each other for four, five, ten years. I've slept on all their couches. I've called them crying. They've seen me at my worst and best, so far, and I'm sure they'll see me at the next ones. They deserve parties. They deserve to sit in their beds in the middle of the morning, holding a book that has no right to be so good, with the light hitting the room in a way that will change everything. And they deserve this, a promise to love them, even and especially.