Shuggie Bain

I wasn’t entirely sure whether to read Shuggie Bain. Certain friends told me it was depressing (they weren’t wrong), others told me it was brilliant (they were right).
Any book that deals with the thorny issues of alcoholism, poverty and Margaret Thatcher is going to leave a mark. I can testify to the latter. I was 13 and living in Manchester when Thatcher embarked on her psychotic destruction of the North. It was grim. Blue-collared cities like Glasgow got hammered and it still casts a long shadow to this day.
Stripped-down, it’s about Shuggie Bain growing up in poverty in Glasgow with his mother, Agnes. She’s a wonderfully complex character, she loves her children, she loves to dance, and she loves to drink. The last one show more eventually hollows her out.
Shuggie is a sensitive boy and it’s his otherness that makes him stand out from the feral neighborhood kids. He doesn’t like football, nor does he want to throw rocks at the moon. At school he is bullied by teachers and pupils alike.
But it’s also a book full of warmth and humour. The final scene with Shuggie and his mum is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. And one of the saddest. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to shed a tear at the end. That said, I very much doubt Margaret Thatcher would have wept. show less

This book left me scratching my head, wondering why I didn't like it more. Though the text rings with gritty, northern-U.K. authenticity written in flawless prose, the overall effect was, for me, numbing. And not the grand "all passion spent" numbness one likes virtuosically spun from a finale; instead, just numb, numb, numb, pretty much from start to finish. Was this the intended effect? Was this our chance as readers to chug down whole publoads of emotional devastation? Is it the book saying, look, reader dear, you don't know from devastation; just shut up and help me burnish my Booker? If so, point taken. But if so, may I beg leave to add that your narrative sometimes seems like a tableau from which the life has been artificially purged?

I adored this book. What stands out to me most is that I cared about the characters from very early on, but then with every page I cared about them more. That's true of everyone from the most central characters to the most peripheral. If the book had gone on much longer I would have had to start building a time machine (and whatever device is required to travel into fiction) and gone back in time to adopt Shuggie. But even when a peripheral character reached a fork in the road, I hoped they'd choose the right choice. In the book this often came in the form of a peripheral character doing something awful, and me hoping they had a good reason for it, or good intentions. I think this is a sign every character's actions are motivated - no show more one is bad just because.

The other remarkable thing is that the narrator portrays everything without judgement. He doesn't romanticise the characters or their choices, but nor does he condemn them. Initially I found the violence and sexual violence confronting, but then I realised there was something moving about the frank way it was presented. It was as if Stuart was trusting the reader to handle it, and so I had to find a way to handle it.

The prose is lovely - unfussy but descriptive. It really feels as if the author is just getting on with telling the story, but it's an incredibly rich and vivid story so it takes four hundred pages. show less

4.5 I knew it! When I was only fifty pages or so into the book, I had the feeling it was going to break my heart. It did. Glasgow in the eighties, many live in council housing, a day to day existence. These people are so messed up, poor and struggling, trying to find money, love, desperate beyond belief. Agnes turns to drink, anything to escape the mess she has made of her life. Her three children, try their best, but it is never enough. One leaves home as soon as she can, leaving her mother and two brothers far behind.

It is Shuggie though who breaks my heart and to s certain extent his older brother Leek. They both have responsibilities they should not have at their age. Shuggie though has an additional struggle, as he doesn't fit in show more anywhere. His sexual orientation makes him stand out, he walks different, doesn't like sports. Ultimately he is picked on and bullied. He also feels if his mother just realized how much he love her, she would stop drinking.

This story feels do very real. Children that grow up in households where ones parent is an alcoholic, will recognize the authenticity of the way the children act. How they often blame themselves, take on responsibilities way too early. Believe me I know. I think that is why this book hit me so hard.

A terrific book, full of emotion and the struggles of a parent who can't face reality. A parent who struggles with a fearsome addiction. Yet, reading this one can't help but feel for her too.

ARC from Netgalley. show less

Midlife memoirs -- the kind where people survive incredibly irresponsible parents, awful bad luck, or unimaginably unjust social conditions -- and live to tell and write about it, are a guilty pleasure of mine. This made it surprisingly difficult for me to figure out what I thought about "Suggie Bain." On a purely literary level, it's easy to admire. Stuart shapes his characters with genuine care, conveying the emotional impact of each character's misfortunes without sinking into pity or melodrama. He sneaks Scots dialect into the text effectively, using words that the Oxford hasn't heard of without making his characters into north-of-the-Tyne caricatures. And, somehow, he makes the story of the Bain clan something other than horribly show more depressing to read about. I won't go into details here, but the barest plot outline will tell you why that's an achievement in itself. In the hands of a less gifted writer, "Suggie Bain" would be ham-handed poverty porn, and, quite frankly, the books setting is so grey and lifeless and so many of its characters so obviously doomed from the very outset that I'm not completely sure that, at some level, it isn't. Readers will have to make up their own minds there.

But there are other, more interesting reasons to like "Shuggie Bain." The novel works wonderfully as a sort of architectural and structural critique. The word "brutalism" is never mentioned here, but it's clear that the author has it in his sights. We hear about grey, blocky buildings, lifeless housing developments, the lunar landscape of the coal pits. This novel's characters seem to be trapped into whatever the opposite of Le Corbusier's "machines for living" would be: they're stuck trying to live human lives in what are obviously inhuman environments. By showing their as-often-as-not struggle to make a home out of obviously desolate environments, Bain's taking aim at several decades -- maybe several generations -- of meticulously planned but ultimately unsuccessful social development. This makes "Shuggie Bain" a political work in the best sense of the word.

The other reason I rather liked this one is that it's a wonderful exploration of gay difference that makes a deliberate choice to avoid this theme's most familiar tropes. Shuggie is certainly treated badly for being a young gay man, but the hostility he faces seems to be of a piece with his environment's general hostility to difference and non-conformity. The novel's set in the eighties, but we don't hear anything about the AIDS epidemic: Shuggie and his family are so socially isolated that they seem to exist well apart from those headlines. Lastly, you could argue that Shuggie's gayness -- his softness, his lack of interest in typical male pursuits, his unwillingness to be explicitly aggressive toward others -- that saves him from the fate that awaits so many of his hetero peers. In this, "Shuggie Bain" rather reminded me of Justin Torres's "We the Animals," which isn't, to be honest, half the novel that "Shuggie Bain" is, but which also presents queerness as an unexpected means of escape. And escape is something that Shuggie -- and everyone in the novel -- certainly needs. This one can be a long, harrowing reading experience, but it still comes recommended. show less

In retrospect, I really wish I’d read this with a side of wine. Or possibly antidepressants. What a bleak story! Well told, but bleak as all heck. My first bit of advice: save this for a time in your life when you are feeling emotionally resilient and able to handle all the despair.

Why bleak? Because the people in this novel are trapped in cycles of poverty, abuse, and exhaustion over which they have almost no control, thanks to psychological factors (cruelty and despair are ingrained in them from the earliest age), social factors (attempts to escape are all-too-often thwarted jealous peers), economic factors (rent controls ensure that they always end up in economically depressed areas, no matter how many times they move), and a show more religion (Catholicism) that makes it impossible to escape brutal marriages or leverage any control over unending pregnancies that merely escalate the poverty, abuse, and exhaustion noted above.

This novel focuses specifically on the plight of Agnes, lucky enough to be born with beauty and some aspiration, and her unusually empathetic and gentle son Hugh. (The fact that Hugh is gay doesn’t really impact the story, except to underscore the extent to which he is unsuited for survival in this blighted dystopia.) We pray that Agnes’s beauty will be enough to attract a man able to lift her from her predestined misery and that, once given an opportunity, her aspiration will be strong enough to sustain her. We pray that Hugh will survive the brutish conditions of his childhood before all the gentleness is crushed out of him. But, honestly, what are the chances of these things happening in a culture that doesn’t even blink at fathers raping their daughters, at husbands beating their wives to death, at parents starving their children in order to spend their weekly food allowance on booze, or at cuckolded husbands casually murdering babes that aren’t theirs?

Forget that this is set in 1980s Glasgow – subtract the Catholicism and you’re left with a morality play that is both timeless and universal. According to the blurb, this is supposed to be a “heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love.” I would argue that this is a heartbreaking story about what happens when you strip any race, class or caste of humans of opportunity and dignity. Sex may provide some temporary diversion, and alcohol/drugs some temporary forgetfulness, but the only hope of escape is selfless love, and what are the chances of that happening? Stuart keeps stringing us along, making us hope that least one of the relationships in this novel will save our blighted protagonists ... but you might want to keep those antidepressants at the ready just in case. show less

With a glorious, full-throated shout into the void, Douglas Stuart takes the reader into poverty and survival in 1980s Scotland. The gut-wrenching realness of Shuggie's experiences digs deep into our souls and reminds us of the tenuous grip we all have on our happy lives. Tremendous.