20 dec

The French are depressed, The Economist writes. Always have been. Joie de vivre is an english invention of french life. Joie de pluie, joie de doom, joie d’ennui.
I sympathize with the French, having finished this morning the novel Stoner by John Wiiliams, an American writer who wrote his books in the sixties and seventies and has been rediscovered this year.
It is an awful good book. Julie asked me: first you said it was depressing, now you say it is terrific. What is it? The answer is, it is both, although depressing could also be read in the words that Claire used after reading the book: ‘It didn’t really cheer you up.
Americans like to pride themselves at their ‘can do’ mentality. And it is something that I really like in them.
But it is nonsense of course to think that every American is able to accomplish everything he/she wished for in life. Stoner couldn’t. Even worse. He was utterly unable to have a serious impact on his own life. Everything happens to him. He’s not able to influence his destiny, at least not to improve it.
I definitely do not have a can do mentality. I recognize myself in Stoner, with this difference that I try to optimize the situation. I am like Stoner in accepting fate, but then I start to twiddle around with it and telling myself I have a jolly good time with it. And often I do.
But what a masterfully told story. At one point he thinks about guilt. He’s not going to fall for the ‘easy luxury of guilt’, he states when confronted with the unhappiness of his daughter.
That is a masterful sentence and tells the whole story, in a way. Things happen, things go wrong, you are part of it, but you could not really find a way to behave differently. Feeling guilty is an easy luxury. You fail, realize it, admit it, go on with the world. If life could only be as easy as that.
Feeling guilty might not be responsible enough. Things have gone wrong, not because you made a mistake, but because you behaved as you are.You could not have done it differently. How can you feel guilty about that? In that case, feeling guilty is the easy way out, is an easy luxury.
Stoner has a despicable wife, who is constantly looking out for something to make her husband feel guilty about. Without success, obviously. Even when he gets cancer, at the end, all her thoughts are about her own concerns. No wonder Stoner, what a name!, is less and less interested in her thoughts and in her, as a matter of fact.
This story gets behind the facade that everyone keeps up. We all have to, that is what social life is about. Nothing wrong with it either. But then, reading Stoner, one has to rethink oneself. The picture isn’t exactly rosy. It is more like a cold shower. Uncomfortable but refreshing.
And that just after I was getting used to the warm jacuzzi! But then again, thinking about the depressed French, who thinks of going into a jacuzzi in France?