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Shuggie Bain: A Novel by Douglas Stuart
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Shuggie Bain: A Novel (original 2020; edition 2020)

by Douglas Stuart (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,4501246,105 (4.19)311
Fiction. Literature. This is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking goodâ??her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefitsâ??all the family has to live onâ??on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Meanwhile, Shuggie is struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to herâ??even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen… (more)
Member:booked_ambivert
Title:Shuggie Bain: A Novel
Authors:Douglas Stuart (Author)
Info:Grove Press (2020), 448 pages
Collections:Read, Your library, Currently reading, To read
Rating:
Tags:to-read

Work Information

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (2020)

  1. 40
    Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (Anonymous user)
  2. 10
    L'Assommoir by Émile Zola (raudakind)
    raudakind: Good glimpses into the horrors of poverty in different historical eras, enlivened by vivid and clever descriptions of the manners and surroundings of the characters.
  3. 00
    Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (shaunie)
    shaunie: Both feature alcoholic mothers and have similarly grim subject matter, but somehow manage to transcend that into something quite beautiful.
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» See also 311 mentions

English (110)  Dutch (6)  Swedish (2)  Catalan (1)  Spanish (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (121)
Showing 1-5 of 110 (next | show all)
2020 Booker Prize winner is effective in showing the circumstance of being a child identifiably "different" (gay) in an unaccepting environment, while also being carried along in the suffering of an alcoholic mother living in poverty. Shuggie has very little agency in the novel, being a child for the bulk of it, so it is rather focused on the tides that push him about and how they affect him, which perhaps is not my favorite kind of reading experience.

The novel's opening chapter is a bit of a head fake - Shuggie is 16 years old and living on his own, the rest of the book is going to be what led up to this, but it is effective in setting the sense of Shuggie as "not right" in the eyes of the community around him and in the voice of self-doubt in his own head. The strong writing however is not false, that will be carried though the novel as you would expect in a Booker winner. Take this scene of Shuggie out after work with some women from his workplace:
With every passing graze of her ringed knuckles, she clamped her fat tongue between her teeth, and kept her eyes burning into the side of his face. When Shuggie had finally flared with embarrrassment, she had tutted, and Jackie had pushed two pound notes across the table to a beaming, victorious Nora. It was a disappointment, sure, but as they drank deeper they decided it had not been a rejection exactly. Something about the boy was no right, and this was at least something they could pity.


This sense of him as "not right" has burrowed into his own mind as well, as one would expect from a life up to then of being seen as such:

In the mirror his wet hair was black as coal. As he brushed it down over his face he was surprised to find it nearly to his chin. He stared and tried to find something masculine to admire in himself: the black curls, the milky skin, the high bones in his cheeks. He caught the reflection of his own eyes in the mirror. It wasn't right. It wasn't how real boys were built to be. He scrubbed at himself again.


After this opening however the novel goes back in time to show Shuggie's childhood with a self-destructive alcoholic mother, an absent father, humiliation from his peers, frequent hunger, sketchy at best school attendance, etc., as he thinks perhaps he can love his mother out of her problem - naturally an entirely doomed effort which provides the novel with pathos upon pathos.

Besides all that, this book did expose me to a nice bit of Scots slang, to wit:

stoated = wandered around
boak = vomit
dout = short end of a cigarette
laldy = with lots of energy, gusto
sleekit = crafty, deceitful
braw = fine, pleasant
stour = swirling dust
messages = groceries
smirr = fine rain, drizzle
flitting = moving house, semi-secretly like
greeting = crying ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
"What good was a soft boy in a hard world?" Highly recommended for all libraries. ( )
  librarianarpita | Feb 18, 2024 |
This isn't an easy read because of its content but it is so well written and descriptive I found it (strangely) an enjoyable experience. I felt privileged to be allowed to see into these lives. For me the brilliance of the writing is in the conversations between people. The two alcoholic women spending an afternoon with cans of Special Brew, the taunts and bullying of children, around a family table and the non-alcoholics failing to understand what addiction is. These and more were perfectly captured in this novel. In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie is the youngest of a family of three. His mother is an alcoholic. They live with Shuggie's grandmother at first and then are moved to a edge-of-town housing scheme packed with cousins. Shuggie doesn't fit in and his loyalty to his proud mother is heartbreaking. I loved them both and wanted happy endings for them so much but this rollercoaster of a novel played with my emotions until the end. ( )
  CarolKub | Feb 8, 2024 |
This has been on my to-read list for a while, but the reason I picked it up now was realising I could use it to fulful the Booker or Pulitzer winner item in this year's Helmet reading challenge, as I happened to spot it on the prize winner shelf at the library—it got the Booker in 2020. I found the main emotions this book inspired in me were sadness and despair over the loss of inspired lives. Shuggie has a chance, but his mother who looms large enough over the book I thought calling it Agnes Bain would have been equally appropriate, or Shuggie's siblings didn't, unless they left it all behind. ( )
  mari_reads | Jan 27, 2024 |
This story is about a narcissist alcoholic mom as told through the eyes of her effeminate possibly gay child.

After figuring this out, I wondered where the author could take this award-winning story for the remaining 350 pages.

I knew it was going to be painful.

I was bullied as a child (because I was overweight and wore glasses) and I know that wasn’t fun.

During my university years I had personal experience living around alcoholics and I know that isn’t much fun either.

Well, for one thing, it really didn’t matter.

Douglas Stuart seems to write humour and tragedy effortlessly. He leads me through Glaswegian conversations one could expect between consenting and not so consenting Scottish adults, Scottish “aunties” and children, between Scottish “uncles” and children, and between Scottish children that feel true and timeless.

I sometimes felt as though I was re-living the tragedy of Euripides’ Medea who would sacrifice her children before being consumed by fate and her own hubris, or that I was in a dark forest listening to Macbeth’s witches concoct a “special brew.” Or possibly revisiting Stephen Frears’ “My Beautiful Laundrette” where a gay man can simply find freedom in his differentness, and not have to conform for the sake of his society’s expectations.

They are stuck in Margaret Thatcher’s 1980’s puragtorio. After the closing of the mines but before the excesses of North Sea oil. And for the time being, Scotland has no way out.

Suggie Bain is at once confined by his mother’s differentness and liberated by it, the parallels between her descent into alcoholism and his growth into an independent young man are undeniable.

In a weird way his mom Agnes teaches Suggie how to win his independence even living in a moonscape of broken ideals, broken homes, broken economy, broken schools, broken nature, and broken health.

Aye, and even a broken Scotland, a Scotland whose only solidarity lay among the drunks and the envious louts.

Is Agnes a stand-in for jolly old England drunk on empires lost and royal heritage? Is it every Catholic and Protestant for themselves?

This story is a kind of upside-down bildungsroman, a quest of sorts that feels as much Henry Fielding as that other great contemporary Scottish author, Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame.

There’s plenty of satire and irony to go around.

It is pretty obvious by this story where fate will take you, less so what is the meaning of freedom in the midst of hardship and generalized poverty.

Agnes’ lair — Suggie’s home — is supposed to be spotless according to the narrator. But we know there are cans of lager and bottles of half-drunk vodka hidden everywhere. We know Agnes smokes like a chimney, and the thought of those rooms filled with smoke, cigarette butts and stale beer makes me gag.

Stuart fills in all of the details, where you are left to guess with other contemporary writers.

Suggie maintains the hope — something his siblings have given up on — that his mother will “get better” and that he will eventually become “normal,” although normal in this society is hardly aspirational.


And that forms the tension in this marvelous story, the best I’ve read in quite a while. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 110 (next | show all)
Shuggie Bain is set in this world of men run aground after the closure of mines, women sunk under the weight of drink, families living week to week on public assistance and disability benefits. It speaks in a Scottish English whose rhythms, even whose vocabulary, can be alien for American readers: misty with smirr and dusty with stour, its bruisers glaikit in their foolishness, gallus in their pride.... At its center is Agnes Bain, an imperious former beauty in a now-ratty mink whose disintegration Stuart observes lovingly but unsparingly. Shuggie is her youngest, her ward, her protector, and her target. He bobs in her beery wake, no more able to save her than his baby doll, Daphne.... Stuart’s project as a writer is in part about clearing space for tenderness among men, space for love.
added by Lemeritus | editVulture, Matthew Schneier (Nov 10, 2020)
 
It is in many ways a harsh, bleak novel, for that decade was a harsh and bleak time in Glasgow, when the shipyards, engineering works and the coalfields on the city’s fringe were closing, and so many of the working-class were no longer working but living on benefits.... There is poverty, squalor and degradation here, much foul language and causal, sometimes brutal sex. What redeems the novel and makes it remarkable is that its central theme is love – a caring, responsible love.... The relationship between Agnes and Shuggie is beautifully, tenderly and understandingly done. Stuart doesn’t sentimentalise it and he hides nothing of the horrors of galloping alcoholism, but there is a gallantry about Agnes which commands respect and admiration, however reluctantly.
added by Lemeritus | editThe Scotsman, Allan Massie (Aug 21, 2020)
 
It is, then, a testament to Douglas Stuart’s talent that all this literary history—along with the tough portraits of Glaswegian working-class life from William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Agnes Owens—can be felt in Shuggie Bain without either overshadowing or unbalancing the novel ... Stuart’s [has a] Grassic Gibbon–like ability to combine love and horror, and to give equal weight to both. Not only is Shuggie Bain dedicated to his mother, but in the acknowledgments he writes that 'I owe everything to the memories of my mother and her struggle'; he’s clearly determined to give all the contradictory aspects of that struggle their full due ... Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild contradictions to convincingly coexist is also on display in the individual vignettes that comprise the novel, blending the tragic with the funny, the unsparing with the tender, the compassionate with the excruciating ... Otherwise, the author is too generous—and, it would seem, too fond of his mother—for the central focus to lie anywhere but in the fierce, warm-hearted portrait of Agnes in all her maddening glory. As a result, this overwhelmingly vivid novel is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence.
 
... his novel is resolutely, wonderfully Scottish at heart ... such a delight. Rarely does a debut novel establish its world with such sure-footedness, and Stuart’s prose is lithe, lyrical and full of revelatory descriptive insights. This is a memorable book about family, violence and sexuality ... Agnes is drawn with extraordinary sympathy: she simply leaps from the page as she juggles motherhood, a violent and philandering husband and her own demons, drink foremost among them. She is troubled, lovable, vulnerable and resilient ... This is a deeply political novel, one about the impact of Thatcherism on Glaswegian society ... It is brilliant on the shame of poverty and the small, necessary dignities that keep people going. It is heartbreakingly good on childhood and Shuggie’s growing sense of his otherness, of not being the same as the other boys on the estate ... Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.
 
With his exquisitely detailed debut novel, Douglas Stuart has given Glasgow something of what James Joyce gave to Dublin. Every city needs a book like Shuggie Bain, one where the powers of description are so strong you can almost smell the chip-fat and pub-smoke steaming from its pages, and hear the particular, localized slang ringing in your ears.... Agnes...is the real heroine of this story, so evocative and striking that she may be one of those characters you never forget. Stuart writes about Shuggie, a lonely, loving boy struggling with his sexuality, with skill. But the depiction pales in comparison to the sheer, knock-out force of what he managed to create with Agnes ... Shuggie Bain is full of people doing and saying awful things to one another all the time, but nobody really seems truly awful. Maybe this is what makes the novel so powerful and sad—it turns over the ugly side of humanity to find the softness and the beauty underneath.
added by Lemeritus | editJacobin, Eliza Gearty (Mar 16, 2020)
 

» Add other authors (1 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Stuart, Douglasprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Coulson, JezCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
King, AngusNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pickersgill, MartynAuthor photographsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vries, Willemijn deNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wilson, StuartCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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For My Mother, A.E.D.
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The day was flat.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Fiction. Literature. This is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking goodâ??her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefitsâ??all the family has to live onâ??on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Meanwhile, Shuggie is struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to herâ??even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen

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