Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart
Grove Press, 2020

Bleak, grey, fundamentally hopeless 1980s Glasgow is the setting for Douglas Stuart’s arresting debut Shuggie Bain, which tells tells the parallel stories of the young boy “Shuggie” Bain, delicate, wistful, and gay in a time and place where gay is impossible, and his mother Agnes, fierce-spirited, pathetic, and bottomlessly alcoholic. It’s a characteristic of parallel lines that although they might in some ways reflect each other they can never meet, and this characteristic accounts for both the narrative tension of the novel and its besetting frustration.

The novel is called Shuggie Bain, but at least half its readers will come away from its incredibly moving final pages convinced it should have been called Agnes Bain. Stuart does such a judicious job balancing her portrait between helpless bathos and a very fragile kind of motherly love that Agnes never loses her power to fascinate, despite having the alcoholic’s intense predictability. The cans hidden in her handbag, the hardened selfishness, the maudlin manipulativeness, the constant striving for an affect of poise and respectability that only she can think is convincing: these things combine to make Agnes a human wrecking ball in the lives of her children, Catherine, Leek, and Shuggie, and a source of exasperating anger to her husband Big Shug, who moves her and the children to a squalid new home early on in the book (“The facing of the chipboard was peeling in places, and Shug stood working his pinkie finger under one of the laminates. Behind him in the corner above the cooker, sprawled a vine of black mould”). 

He moves her there in order to leave her at long last. “I don’t want your dinners anymore,” he tells her. “Don’t you get it? This is it. I can’t stay anymore. I can’t stay with you. All your wanting. All that drinking.” Big Shug is a cab driver and a desultory womanizer, a big man whose charm and force are slowly eroding, and a follow-along glimpse of his work life is one of innumerable occasions in the novel for Stuart’s gorgeously harrowing descriptions of the Glasgow underworld of a generation ago:

Shug told the man the fare was a pound seventy and watched him ferret in one pocket after another. All the Glasgow jakeys did this. Their Friday wages were splintered by every bar they passed till they rolled around in pockets as five and ten pence in change, the cumulative weight of the heavy small coins giving them a waddling walk and a hump. They would live on the coins for the rest of the week, taking their chances with their random findings. Even in sleep they were never to be separated from their trousers and large coats for fear their wives or children would tip them out first and buy bread and milk with the shrapnel.

Running alongside all this is the decidedly more muted story of our title character, who’s never allowed the sharp interiors of Agnes; even talented, deeply damaged Leek is far more intrinsically interesting. It’s as though Stuart assumes that merely making Shuggie gay in a Spartan and hateful environment (the page count’s scarcely in double digits before he’s first called “Liberace” or “poof”) tells readers as much as they’re likely to want to know about him, and given the wide acclaim accorded to some wire-thin gay novels in the last few years, this may be a good assumption. But it’s not particularly good storytelling, and too often it leaves Shuggie a passive and one-dimensional figure in a book with his name as its title. 

This impression is strengthened by the author’s weakness for artificially heightened contrasts. It’s not just that the new Bain neighborhood is a damp, drafty, sooty hell of cheap worker’s homes, it’s that all the inhabitants are subhuman troglodytes, the women squinty-eyed and hostile, the children almost entirely feral, and the husbands ghosts out of Homer’s Hades, however beautifully described:

The miners’ tackety boots made sparks on the tarmac. The men slowly started drifting one by one along the empty road. There was no colliery whistle now; still the men were pushed along by the muscle memory of a dead routine, heading home at finishing time with nothing being finished, only a belly full of ale and a back cowed with worry. Their donkey jackets were clean and their boots were still shiny as they jerked along the road. Shuggie stepped back as they passed, their heads lowered like  those of tired black mules. Without a word, each man collected a handful of thin children, who followed obediently, like reverential shadows.

Little wonder such creatures promptly hate and mock Shuggie; little wonder their vicious instincts are immediately alerted by his different airs. 

Little wonder, and precious little guessing as to how it will all work out: either violence or Hollywood marzipan. It’s to Stuart’s credit that he opts for a more nuanced third way, and it’s one of many things to his credit in this very strong debut. The story is filled with evocative prose and instantly memorable characters, and it gives readers a Glasgow as real as anything in their own life. There are even glimmers of hope, though very faint.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.