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Shuggie Bain
by
Douglas Stuart
I couldn’t stop reading this award-winning debut novel about a young boy, his alcoholic mother and the family’s efforts to either set Agnes Bain straight or run away fast. Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for several other awards including the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2021, the American Library Association named it a notable book for adult fiction.
Set in Glasgow, Scotland during the post-industrial 1980s, this autobiographical coming-of-age story follows young Shuggie Bain and his working-class family over a period of eleven years. In 1981, Agnes, her husband, Shug and their three children live with her parents in a cramped tenement apartment in Sighthill. Catherine and Leek, teenagers from Agnes’s first marriage, are desperate to escape. Agnes drinks, Shug drives a taxi on the night shift and cheats on her between fares. Agnes’s parents look back at the mistakes they made with their only child. And Shuggie, at five, already knows he’s different but he can’t articulate why. And he can’t distance himself from Agnes. He needs his mother.
Shuggie is six when the family moves to public housing in Pitthead, an abandoned mining town. With no work, the men drink and the women struggle to feed their large families. Agnes, however, thinks herself better than the other women. And although she’s careful with her appearance and keeps the house clean, inside, she drinks away their weekly benefits. On the days when Shuggie goes to school, he comes home to find her slumped in a chair, with empty cans of lager wedged in the seat cushions.
Can you say you loved such an ugly and depressing story? I don’t know. All I can say is that I became completely invested in the characters. Like Shuggie, I hoped that Agnes would pull herself together and that he would be okay. I felt sad when the neighborhood children and his classmates abused him for being a “poof,” a term he didn’t even understand, let alone his own sexuality.
Ironically, Agnes has taught him to hold his head high, something that contributes to his resilience. When Shuggie calls a cab to retrieve her from a drunken party, the driver remarks at how put-together he is for an eleven-year-old. He asks him if he’s headed to a party. “Well, kind of. I also just think it’s important to always look your best,” he tells the man.
And later, with nowhere to go, Shuggie turns to Leek who gives him some hard advice. “How am I meant to raise you? What have I got? No one can help you, but you, Shuggie,” he says.
The author tells an unforgettable story in Scotland during a period of great hardship in which factories, mines and industries were shut down, during Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. A divide between Catholics and Protestants also contributed to tension and violence in Scotland. So a story in a story, another mark of an excellent book. This book reminded me of the memoirs Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and Educated by Tara Westover. So if you liked those you would like this one.
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