The Graves of Academe

Skinner continuedfrom previous page But whatever form this resistance takes, we're assured it will come "from the bottom." Ironically, this is exactly how López Obrador is defining his postelection Convergence Movement: as a grassroots resistance, or, to use Daniel Ortega's phrase in defining the role of the Sandinistas after his own electoral defeat in the Nicaraguan presidential elections of 1990, "a government from below." And just as Marcos might have predicted, López Obrador's former allies in the PRD, among them Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, PRD candidate for president in 1988, are publicly distancing themselves from him, doubting the wisdom of this resistance, and wondering how this government from below is to manifest itself. As this timely offering from City Lights, one of the United States's bellwether political presses, attests, The Other Campaign sounds exactly like something the postelection López Obrador would have written, had Marcos not beat him to it. The logical thing would be for these two lefties to now put their massive egos aside and their heads together and try to come up with a genuine strategy of resistance to Mexico's political establishment. Ifnot, they might both go the way of Edén Pastora, who ended up an impoverished, forgotten fisherman in Costa Rica. José Skinner reviews borderlands writing at the University ofTexas-Pan American. The Graves of Academe Michael Leone Stoner John Williams New York Review Books http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb 304 pages; paper, $14.95 Stoner, a novel written by the late John Williams , was first published in 1965. The book spans fifty years and is about a Missouri college professor and his troubled, if not banal, life. Imagine the perplexity of readers when they opened the book and came across the deliberately toneless first paragraph that betrays the entire plot: "William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age ofnineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956." Williams, writing in the mid-sixties, surrounded by the playfulness of Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, and other postmodernist writers then in season , seems to challenge the reader: Yes, I am going to tell you in straightforward prose about the life of a straightforward man. Whatever Williams's intent, it didn't catch on. The novel sold two thousand copies and plummeted out of print. Gradually, word of mouth from impassioned writers and readers kept the book alive, bestowing upon it the oft-scorned label "neglected classic." The book continues in print in an edition by the University of Arkansas Press, but the volume they have produced has a drab, muddy, hymnal quality to it, with a cover that features a gloomy, blackand -white photograph of an army of severe-looking students. (It's also twenty-two dollars.) The new edition by NYRB Classics comes with a gorgeous cover painting by Thomas Eakins. It is also prefaced by an essay by the late Irish writer John McGahern. Stoner is an academic novel, meaning its story takes place in the academy and concerns the life of a college professor. However, what separates Stoner from other recent academic novels, such as Jane Smiley's Moo (1995) and Richard Russo's Straight Man (1997), is that those authors rely primarily on satire while Williams relies on drama. One reason satire works so well in academic novels is because there tends to be so little at stake—tenure—that in order to keep us engaged, the writers better make us laugh. Drama is harder to employ in an academic setting. The characters have to be more than namedropping dilettantes. They have to be human. The story is a simple one: William Stoner is born on a poor Missouri farm. Expected by his parents to study agriculture at the University ofMissouri , upon hearing Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet he decides to devote his life to the study of literature. Though William is neither very brilliant nor very charismatic, he has discipline and integrity, and it will be these two qualities he must rely...