It's a good novel. This is also a good interview, and point of the novel comes out: a portrait of a person as a hero by doing nothing other than being himself.
A novel doesn't need to include morally ambiguous characters to be good. It doesn't have to reproduce the world or the people in it faithfully. It can be impressionistic or allegorical or whatever.
I suppose this is all subjective. Something is only overly sentimental if it failed to make you feel something, which is clearly the case here for you. I don't know why I'm compelled to argue. I suppose because I liked the novel and it made be feel something.
I'd argue that moral ambiguity is necessary if you want to write people believably because all people are morally ambiguous. Either way, I don't think believable characters are necessary.
I recently read a pair of Saramago novels - Blindness and Seeing - that don't contain believable characters. They're all caricatures. The novels still work, and they're still acclaimed.
I have two perspectives on judging the quality of literature:
1. What's important about a novel is its style. Every story has been told so quality is a question of how it is told. Attributes like "realistic characters" or "realistic plot" are meaningless: what matters is the nuts and bolts of how your novel is constructed - from diction to sentence structure to the overarching structure of the whole thing. Keep in mind - I'm not arguing for a universal style guide, I'm arguing that a person's opinions about literature should be based on their opinions about style.
2. Quality is subjective - there's no such thing as a good novel, just a novel that you like. From this perspective, a novel can be said to be good if lots of people liked it over some period of time, but there's no "theory of quality," just the weight of opinions and time.
From this perspective, whether Stoner lives up to the hype is a question of whether the hype endures. We'll see. I wouldn't bet either way but I'm glad of the hype. Without it, I wouldn't have read the novel, and I enjoyed it.
A novel doesn't need to include morally ambiguous characters to be good. It doesn't have to reproduce the world or the people in it faithfully. It can be impressionistic or allegorical or whatever.
I suppose this is all subjective. Something is only overly sentimental if it failed to make you feel something, which is clearly the case here for you. I don't know why I'm compelled to argue. I suppose because I liked the novel and it made be feel something.