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TAlthough there were four debuts on Booker’s list, it has been more than a decade since he won a debut. And with two master novels by established writers in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body on the list, the success of newcomer Douglas Stuart may come as a surprise. But it will be immensely popular, because readers have already taken Shuggie Bain seriously – it was the best-selling novel on this year’s finalists list and the favorite to win.
Stuart’s tale of a 1980s Glasgow childhood, ruined by parental addiction and Thatcher’s deprivation of Britain, is a bolt from nowhere – extraordinarily immersive, heartbreaking but never maudlin, a straightforward story. of love and resistance in the most difficult of circumstances.
Agnes is an energetic and bright woman who keeps up appearances and always wants more, in a community that survives on less and less. She adores and is adored by her little son Shuggie: and as the years go by and Agnes is destroyed by alcoholism, her spirit crushed by abusive men, that love between them never wavers.
Her husband abandons her; Shuggie’s older brothers escape when they can; and he’s the only one left to save her, except, of course, that he can’t be saved. The reader becomes as desperate for Agnes’ happiness as little Shuggie, and hopes that the time will come when he will find a firm and understanding man; who finally asks if he won’t have just one drink, to be normal.
Shuggie Bain is an accomplished work of fiction, but it is also charged with pure truth. Stuart writes from his own experiences; his own mother died of alcoholism when he was 16 years old. He had always felt like an “impostor” for being drawn to the world of literature. When I was a teenager, “studying English was middle class; even the word ‘English’ was jarring and dangerous in Glasgow’s East End. ” At a time when the publication is hungry for diverse voices, Shuggie Bain fits the bill.
In addition to an intimate family psychodrama, this is a great social novel that presents a panoramic picture of a society in which jobs and meaning have been eliminated, and people are freely falling into addiction and despair. But Shuggie’s precocious idiosyncrasies add warmth and humor, as the novel explores what it’s like to grow up gay in a time and place that is wildly aggressive with the idea itself.
Stuart may be a debut novelist, but this book has been a decade, and a lifetime, in writing, and his stories in the New Yorker prove that he is not a one-note author. This is a voice of compassion, precision and breadth that has come fully formed.
