Great books, by people like Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, are great because of the amount of truth that they encompass — so great that we are tempted to call them universal in their significance.
There, I’ve paid proper homage to the big guys. Now I’m talking about a book that deals in truths that no one would call universal. They are local to a place (a small town in Minnesota) and a profession (public high school teaching) and a phase of civilization (American civilization, mid to late twentieth century). The book is Staggerford, by Jon Hassler, and it accurately reports the truth of its setting and subject matter, with humor and pathos
The central character of the novel is a 35 year-old unmarried high school English teacher named Miles Pruitt. The story is told if not in Miles’ voice at least from his point of view. He has studied Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer in graduate school, and now must spend 45 minutes every day proctoring a last period study hall crowded with bored and restive students; and every day he must suppress the groans and giggles that erupt when some student’s anonymous flatulence — never more than 15 minutes into the period — takes the stuffy room by storm.
His trials are more than olfactory. He is strongly attracted to a charming younger woman on the faculty who becomes engaged to the school’s dumb jock principal and his superior salary. He must deflect the attentions of a beautiful, intelligent, and troubled female student who is in love with him. He must help his principal — the guy who got his girl — find a diplomatic resolution to a standing protest by the families of the school’s native American students; the native Americans are bored rather than aggrieved and everyone knows it, but the impasse takes all of Miles’ patience and cynicism to resolve.
To ease the pain of his existence, Miles almost always talks ironically — provoking the further irony that his colleagues don’t understand him.
No, this book is not filled with universal truths, but it seems to me, now that I’ve written all the above, that its truths may be something more than little and local.
Books Matter 
I’ve been reading a fair amount of Minnesota fiction, mostly William Kent Krueger, so this sounds right up my alley, especially with the school angle. Thanks.
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I think you’ll like it. Let me know.
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I’m not much of a fiction reader anymore. I’m still not quite certain whether my taste for fiction changed for the worse in the late twentieth century or whether I simply became less willing to take a chance on new, industry-praised books that seemed more and more to be exercises by their authors for the purpose of working out personal neuroses. The fiction I do read is recommended by Time, or trustworthy opinion, or both. Thanks for this.
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You can move on to your eternal reward without having read this book and still be a well rounded and cultivate scholar.
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