Shuggie Bain is incredible. It’s warm. It’s dark and gritty. And it is a hard read (not ideal for lockdown). Beautifully written, it will slowly grab you into a mesmerising spell of prose, difficult twists and turns and characters who you root for (no matter how bad their behaviour).

This is a spectacular debut (another great pick from the Observer). I do not doubt it will go onto amazing things.

Thanks to Netgalley, Pan Macmillan and Picador for an advanced copy in consideration of an honest review.

A stunning debut from Douglas Stuart, "Shuggie Bain" is going to be massive. The novel is dark and captures the essence of '80s Glasgow perfectly; the poverty and the patter, amidst a background of political devastation. The 'Whitney Houston in wellies' section was my favourite bit and really touched my soul. Stuart masterfully employs beautifully descriptive language, amidst the harshness and heartbreak, and is a vibrant new voice in Scottish fiction.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is such a despairing tale. The truth that is the reality for many, many people growing up poor in a household where a parent is an alcoholic and there is no money for food.

It follows Shuggie’s journey filled with struggle and torment, but it also focuses on Agnes, his mother, and his brother Leek.

It is not an easy book to read: it’s filled with pages and pages of alcoholic excess and co-dependent behaviour that at times seems unbelievable but then, maybe that’s the point.

I was disappointed in the lack of character development. Although the actions of Agnes and Shuggie (and to an extent, Leek) are fastidiously documented, there was no interpretation of thought or feeling. This left me somewhat detached from the story. I felt no empathy for their circumstances and neither liked nor disliked any of the characters enough to form an attachment.

I feel like so much more could have been done to garner a relationship with these characters, but it was almost textbook-like in its portrayal.

#netgalley #shuggiebain #douglasstuart #panmacmillan

Shuggie Bain is one of those novels where, for me, the form let down the content. This is a story about alcoholism, abuse, and poverty, and it is unremitting in its depiction of those things. For all its heavy subject matter, though, it left me largely impassive. It felt like the more the narrative wanted me to feel, the less I actually felt.

The crux of my problem with this novel is its form--that is, its narrative structure and writing style. The writing in Shuggie Bain falls under the weight of its story, not necessarily on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but on a more holistic level.

The narrative, here, suffers from a kind of stasis: it's repetitive, lacking dynamism in both character and plot. Over and over again we see Agnes, the main character in Shuggie Bain aside from Shuggie himself, engage in the same cycle of abuse: she drinks, she gets herself into increasingly precarious situations, she tries to quit drinking, she is seemingly on the mend, and then she relapses. Of course, I can recognize that this kind of cycle exists for many of those who have struggled with substance abuse; I never expected Agnes to get over years of substance abuse after a single attempt to quit drinking. My issue is that narratively, it didn't make for very engaging reading. It's one thing to be reading about the same plot point happening over and over again; it's another thing to have that plot point be about substance abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. The end result was that not only did I start to get impatient with the novel, but I also just started to feel increasingly distanced from and indifferent to its story.

More than that, though, I felt like I never got to know the characters beyond their suffering. There were a few scenes here and there that had genuinely earnest and caring character interactions, but beyond that it was just more of the same: characters either inflicting or being subjected to abuse.

To put it simply, Shuggie Bain largely prioritized the situational over the psychological: the overwhelming need to buy alcohol when you're already extremely financially straitened, the binge drinking and subsequent blackouts, the vulnerability that comes with being a child of an alcoholic mother. What I wanted from Shuggie Bain was to emphasize the psychological alongside the situational, to give me a closer look into the thoughts and emotions of its characters, to make me feel like I knew them and not just the things they did or the things that happened to them.

I want to tread carefully here because I don't want my criticism of this book to be "it was too depressing." Depressing things happen in the world; it feels like a bit of a disservice to call experiences that many people have gone through "too depressing," especially for a novel like this where, I believe, at least some of the story is autobiographical. My problem is not that it was a depressing story, but that it wasn't a particularly well told one.

I know I've been talking about the form and content of a novel as if they're two separate things, but really when it comes down to it, they're inextricable. The content doesn't exist without the form. When a story isn't told well, it doesn't matter how good or bad it is; the end result is just a poorly told story.