Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

 Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain is one of those rare books in the literary world that deals with the working class life. I wish there were more of them. It's a world I can relate to, people the likes of which I am all too familiar, and the sordid lives they live as they just try to get by.

Like Shuggie's mother Agnes, whose love of the bottle impairs her sight of what she's doing to herself and to her kids. Though a lot of Agnes's troubles were not of her own doing exactly, her response to them is entirely her fault. It's the same old story, one I've seen play out many times. Poor me, look what has happened; I'll make poor choices in order to deal with it and to hell with anyone who gets in my way. My children are just collateral damage.

Shuggie Bain hit some personal notes for me, not just with his alcoholic mother and absent father, but with the abuse he himself suffers at the hands of other kids and even one adult man because Shuggie is a young gay boy just trying to get along in life, adoring his mother and wanting to be normal. His story is one of abandonment, one after another they leave him (his father, sister, grandparents, and brother) to suffer with his mother. He obviously adores her, but in the end even she turns on him.

This book won the Booker Prize for 2020, and I'm glad it did. It gives a voice to a story and to characters we don't see enough of in fiction. To be honest, I'm sick of the melancholy stories of the rich. It's refreshing to see myself on the page.

The only trouble I had with Shuggie Bain was the Scottish dialect depicted in the dialogue, which made the reading a little rough at times. But I could find no other fault with it. The characters were believable, disgusting and hopeless as they were; the world is vibrantly alive, though bleak and also hopeless. I give it 4 stars. It wasn't exactly what I thought it would be, but I wasn't disappointed at all.