There are two times in life when reading John Williams’ Stoner is most appropriate: In your early 20s when you begin to sense the possible narrowness of the road ahead, and around retirement age when the ordeals of a lifetime can be examined with a critical eye borne of experience. In between, you’ve both the resources, the energy, and the delusion to hammer at the bars the duty of being has inevitably thrown up around you.

Stoner has been called the perfect American novel. That’s going too far, but in capturing the essence of the everyday, it is worthy of distinction as a quintessential novel. The fraught process of growing up and growing away from home, youthful misguided love, the tribulations that come with adhering to a personal moral code, expectations beautifully raised and shatteringly dashed, that soul-rending realization of how little it all adds up to — all have their moment in the life story of the eponymous protagonist William Stoner.

If Stoner is the perfect anything, it may be the perfect Midwestern novel. Beginning in rural Missouri and never moving further than the occasional visit to St. Louis, there is something in this book that grasps at the interplay of being and nothingness that underpins the geographical majority of the country. For the denizens of the coastal metropolises, the places they were born and raised have unique identities all their own, bringing together the forces of capital, culture, and cosmopolitanism. The Midwest, by comparison, is a massive sprawl beset by the narcissism of small differences — you’re likely to have grown up in an insubstantial community, may have moved to a (relatively) large city (that is also comfortingly located in the Midwest, perhaps daringly a state over), and are now in the process of walking the unremarkable trail of existence generations before you blazed.

None of this is a bad thing, per se, but it means fulfillment must come by necessity either through internal self-actualization or the character of those select few sheer chance will bring into fabric of your life. For Stoner, permanently molded by the unrelenting reserve a family farm eking out subsistence, pure happenstance grants him the gratification of English literature and life as a professor. Also for Stoner, the first woman to catch his eye turns out to be just as misshapen by the binds of a different kind of suffocating frigidity: that of the petty bourgeois lifestyle of a Midwestern banking family.

This, then, is the duel that will define Stoner’s life. That between a career in academia and a marriage he knows has failed a month in. Thrown in for good measure are the complications of academic politics, a daughter who becomes a disfigured pawn in her parents’ personal war, and a clandestine love affair with a student. In the course of 60 years, chances at transcendence present themselves fleetingly. As quickly as they appear, they are often suffocated and snuffed out by the unrelenting march of time, social expectations, personal relationships, and appearances.

Yet, in the end, Stoner isn’t bitter. He could not have taken many other paths than the one he ended up on, not without gratuitous destruction (or the threat thereof). To have lived, loved however briefly, and found a modicum of professional success in spite of it all is remarkable. A lifetime in obscurity is not one that is wasted — it simply requires that we hold the precious moments of bliss that much dearer before it all fades to black.