Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
/
Young Mungo
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press, 2022
James and Mungo, the young teens growing up in a bleak, hardscrabble public housing estate in Glasgow in Douglas Stuart’s new book, Young Mungo, live under an ominous specter: in their time and culture (among other things, Mungo’s older brother is a violent gang leader with an image to uphold), two boys falling in love with each other is functionally impossible, certain to call down wrath from all quarters. Mungo and James take to meeting at the dovecote where James keeps his pigeons, located on a lightly wooded, forgotten patch behind the tenements, “a purgatory only forty feet wide.” And since their own inner natures are stronger than the societal prejudices of all their elders, tragedy and need soon enough prompt them purgatorial exploration – hence the hostile specter: discovery would mean catastrophe.
But that isn’t the only or even the most prominent specter hanging over Young Mungo, as all the many thousands of readers of Stuart’s debut Shuggie Bain will particularly be able to attest. The dreaded novelistic “sophomore slump” is a cliche and yet very real, a predictable doldrum in which a second book is quickly cobbled together from notes or haphazardly assembled from some rightfully-forgotten hank of juvenilia in a bottom desk drawer in order to meet a contractual obligation. In a mean and predictable arithmetic, the brighter the debut the darker the sophomore slump, and debuts in our modern post-literate era don’t get much brighter than Shuggie Bain. From that, it could be easily extrapolated that Douglas Stuart’s second novel would be a morose, petulant little disappointment for even his most ardent fans.
Young Mungo not only dispels this second looming specter but sees it off with almost prodigal ease. Instead, Douglas Stuart’s second novel verifies the presence of a major new fictional voice in the literary chorus. This is every bit as eloquent and fiercely miserable novel as Shuggie Bain – in fact, it may be a hair stronger on both counts, since the brutality in its pages is both more believable and more savage and the thread of its hope is thinner and weaker (not hope for those birds in the dovecote, obviously – they’re as doomed as a cocky jock in a horror movie – but any adult reader will know that by Page 2).
As mentioned, the story revolves around the illicit passion that comes to life between David “Mungo” Hamilton and James Jamieson, with whom Young Mungo falls in love almost immediately, after a first impression of telling ambiguity: “From a distance, between his gangly long arms and his skillful hands, there was conflict about him. He could be either a boy or a man, depending on how he turned, or how the light caught him.”
Once the two young men know what they feel for each other, two plots begin to unfold in the course of the book: they explore those feelings, and everybody around them attacks those feelings. The first works much better than the second, mainly when the second involves Young Mungo’s family deciding to ship him off to a murky loch with a pair of deeply suspect men. This little decampment is evocatively written but even so very nearly derails the book, since it feels both garish and manipulative.
Far more effective is the nearly-flawless way Stuart captures the almost painful yearning of young ardor. He consistently and cannily pairs it with the same incongruously lovely descriptions of the natural world that poked out everywhere in Shuggie Bain, and he returns again and again to the suggestion of charged and unpredictable electric fields:
Mungo couldn’t cross the distance between them. The best he could do was to lay his hand next to James’s so that their little fingers were almost touching. They were close enough that it was as if they were touching. The heat from James’s hand jumped the distance between them and flooded Mungo’s entire body. He lay there, upside down and a world away, and listened to James choke up. He wanted to offer more comfort. The courage wouldn’t come.
“It was James that changed it,” the moment continues. “The pinkie that had lain next to his own crossed over and locked over his. The electrical current that had burned at the border jumped on to his skin and he was scorched.”
The delicacy of such moments is standard fare for gay fiction and yet an almost unbearable counterweight to the brutality literally surrounding the boys at all times. Stuart plays on this contrast so often you’d think it would start to feel tiresome, but that never quite happens, even when some of the passages, though cleanly done, walk right up to the border of Sundance Festival sleeper hit:
Mungo hooked his leg around James’s and brought him easily to the carpet, water sprayed everywhere. He had found someone he could say the cruellest things to and they would not leave. He didn’t care anymore if his lips were sore. They kissed and sucked and bit and lay on top of each other all the way through the evening news and well past the sour trumpets of Coronation Street. As much as they had kissed it had not yet gone any further. It was enough to put his hand up James’s shirt and feel the broad muscles of his back undulate as he rubbed himself against Mungo. James preferred to keep his own hands in the crook of Mungo’s back, softly stroking the downy hair that was growing above his buttocks. It made Mungo feel sleepy, it made him feel safe.
Long before the book has gathered any of the momentum that makes its second half irresistible, readers will be totally invested in that feeling of safety. They’ll yearn for it, most sharply when it appears irrevocably lost. Young Mungo has a brace of qualities in common with some medieval morality play: it’s harrowing, surprisingly elegant, and dangles redemption at arm’s reach past a screen of bigotry, cruelty, and blood. There’s doubtless a monograph to be written on how it reflects the current zeitgeist, but thankfully it’s not concerned with such things, so you won’t need to be either. But you might cry a bit.
-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.