Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

“Shuggie” is Hugh Bain, a boy growing up in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1980s. Clearly, “Shuggie” is also Douglas Stuart, the author of this debut novel, but so sensitive are his insights and so generous is his writing that his story never feels like a memoir. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, shares the center-stage. Much of the novel, always told in third person, is her story: the men she can’t keep, the neighbors that gossip and gleefully sabotage her, her pride, her poverty, her loneliness, her anger, and her addiction. She’s good-looking. A dreamer. Also an alcoholic. Over the 10 years of the novel, Shuggie grows from awkward and effeminate 5 year-old boy to a 15-year-old forced to parent both his mother and himself, while Agnes spirals into, then briefly out of, before finally succumbing to, her illness.

The novel begins with a prelude scene. Shuggie is on his own living in a bed-sit apartment with a job at a grocery store. It’s 1992. He’s 16. The novel will end here, too.

After the prelude the novel jumps back 11 years. Five year-old Shuggie lives with his mother in an apartment that belongs to Agnes’ mother and father. Also in the apartment are Agnes’ two teen-age children from her first marriage: Catherine, nearly a woman, already with a job of her own, and Alexander, called Leek, quiet and artistic. Shuggie’s father, also called Shug, drives a taxi. He trades on his good looks to sleep with Agnes’ friends, other women in the building, women who ride in his cab, and especially the woman dispatcher for the taxi service. Agnes clings to her fantasies of what her life could have been, and soothes her disappointment at what her life really is, by drinking can after can of lager and straight vodka from a tea mug.

Shuggie’s father attempts a new start by moving the family to a place of their own, a council-flat across town, built as housing for the miners working a now-closed mine. But nothing is really new. Soon Shuggie’s father is gone to live with the taxi dispatcher. Catherine makes her own escape by marrying the son of the man she works for and following him to a job in South Africa. Agnes, Shuggie, and his older brother Leek, live off the dole. The weekly money is mostly spent on drink before Thursday. Shuggie skips meals, and skips school. He’s teased and bullied by the other children who instantly see he’s “no right.” He cleans up after his mother, listens to her sorrows, and dials the phone so she can scream at the men and former friends who she feels betrayed her.

The story is dark and would be a downer if it weren’t so beautifully told. Agnes is pathetic, but pitiable. Though she makes endless bad decisions you also understand how she is a victim of her circumstances, of her poverty, and entombed within an illness she is powerless to pull herself out of. Thankfully, there is a long section about two-thirds through the novel where she is, at last, able to connect with an AA group and get sober. Shuggie admits that even his mother’s periods of sobriety are impossible to appreciate because of the anxiety of expecting them to end, and the reader, too, enters this section with relief but dread. She gets a job at a gas station convenience store. She gets a new man who treats her well. The kids throw her a surprise “birthday” party for her one-year sober anniversary. It doesn’t last, but it’s nice while it does, and the novel needs this brightness.

The novel unfolds in a series of episodes that read like fully-realized short stories in themselves. There’s a great story of Agnes trudging through the rain to town, the pockets of her old mink coat stuffed with knick-knacks she’s hoping to pawn for drink money. She stops at a garage to dry herself off and the mechanic sees right through her. With sympathy he calls her out, tells her to quit-fooling herself, and tells her what she really needs to do. There’s a story told by Agnes’ mother as they sit together at her father’s death bed, spilling a secret about something shocking but necessary he did when he came home after the war. And a story of a neighbor woman who drops by one morning for a cup of tea, then proceeds to drink with Agnes all afternoon and eventually convinces Agnes to invite a man over for the evening who will bring more for them to drink, all the time insisting, “ah canna stop long.”

Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize for 2020. Well deserved. So personal is this story I don’t know if Douglas Stuart has another novel in him. I read a short story of his published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. It read like a “Shuggie” story coming after the end of this novel but it wasn’t as good as what’s here. But so much of this novel is so good, and so much reads like real fiction, not just memoir, that there’s a promise here of very good fiction still to come. In any case, there is this. And I was glad to have it.