August 20, 2020 57
ther overshadowing or unbalancing the
novel.
We first meet Shuggie (a Scottish
version of the name Hugh) in a short
opening section set in 1992, when he’s
sixteen, working in a food store and liv-
ing alone in a Glasgow boardinghouse.
We don’t yet know how a teenager’s
life has come to this, but several of
the novel’s themes are deftly foreshad-
owed here. When Shuggie goes out to
bingo with his middle- aged female col-
leagues, they drunkenly fondle him.
When he stays in, he hears the other
boarders drunkenly return home once
the pubs have closed. He also has an
awkward encounter with a boarder
who’s carrying twelve cans of lager,
wearing a gold sovereign ring, and
wrongly expecting that his sexual ad-
vances will be welcome. The man then
gives Shuggie a heartfelt lament for the
old Glasgow:
In ma day a person’s religion said
something about them. Ye came up
through the school having to fight
yer way there through bus- fulls of
cabbage- eating Catholic bastards.
It was something to be proud of.^3From there, the novel moves back to
1981, when Shuggie was five and shar-
ing his maternal grandparents’ rented
apartment in a grim Glaswegian tower
block with his parents, Agnes and
Shug, his half- brother Leek, and his
half- sister Catherine. The atmosphere
in the apartment on what’s evidently a
typical night is one of somewhat des-
perate jollity as Agnes and her friends
play cards and get drunk. With Marga-
ret Thatcher letting Glasgow’s tradi-
tional heavy industry die, “The women
all had men at home. Men rotting into
the settee for want of decent work.”
Not that these men are entirely without
their uses. As the women drink more,
they look forward to when they “would
go home and climb on top of them....
It would be drunk open mouths, hot
red tongues, and heavy clumsy flesh.
Pure Friday- night happiness.” In the
meantime, they consult shopping cata-
logs that show people living more care-
free lives “somewhere far from here.”
It’s already apparent that the woman
dreaming most keenly of a different life
is thirty- nine- year- old Agnes, with the
“movie star smile” she’s had since she
was fifteen and got her teeth replaced by
ones “broad and even and as straight as
Elizabeth Taylor’s.” In her twenties, the
same yearning for something better had
caused her to leave her first husband—a
dependable but unexciting fellow Cath-
olic—for Shug Bain, who’d struck her as
appealingly vain “in the way only Prot-
estants were allowed to be.”
But, as Agnes’s mother puts it, “Look
where better has gotten you”—because
of all the novel’s many characters, the
villainous Shug is the least nuanced.
At the end of the card game he shows
up briefly, before disappearing for the
night with one of Agnes’s friends: part
of his policy not merely to womanize
but to make sure that Agnes knows he’s
womanizing. How romantic that tryst
would have been we can possibly judge
from a later encounter with another of
Agnes’s friends. “But ah love ye,” the
woman tells Shug tearfully. “Aye, well,
take yer fucking knickers off then,” he
replies. “I’ve only got five minutes.”
Initially a flashback to a seaside vaca-
tion Shug and Agnes took a few years
before seems to promise memories of
happier times. But not for long. After
she gets drunk, he pulls her up the
stairs of their cheap hotel by her hair
and, as “she cried out from the pain...
hammered his sovereign ring twice into
her cheek.”
Agnes and the five-year-old Shug-
gie’s first scene together again fore-
shadows much of what follows, as he
embarks on a futile, book- length mis-
sion to do whatever “would make her
happy.” The two are in her bedroom
where, between maternal lagers, they
dance with each other, and she corrects
his Scottish pronunciation of “aboot”
to the English “Ab- oww- t.”^4 Then, in
what will become a recurring phrase,
her voice cracks with “the poor me’s”
and she deliberately sets fire to the cur-
tains with a cigarette.Agnes thinks their life will be trans-
fo r m e d w h e n S hu g fi n d s t h e f a m i l y t h e i r
own rented apartment in Pithead, a
coal- mining community on the edge of
the city. Her hopes of a new beginning
don’t survive the first day there. Having
set off feeling “like the star of her own
matinee,” she discovers the apartment
is much smaller than promised. The
recent closure of the coal mine means
the local men now drink all day, while
their families live on welfare. Most
shattering of all, Shug doesn’t unpack
his cases, announcing instead that he’s
leaving Agnes for another woman: “I
can’t stay with you. All your wanting.
All that drinking.”
Agnes’s violent wanting persists—
despite having few ways to express it-
self except an undimmed pride in her
appearance compared to her neigh-
bors’, with “their dirty skirts and
tea- coloured tights.” Even so, it’s her
drinking that takes center stage, much
to the delight of those badly dressed
neighbors—themselves no strangers to
a drunken blackout^5 —who watch her
decline with the same glee as the Bar-
bie townsfolk watched John Jr.’s in The
House with the Green Shutters.
Catherine, the elder child from Ag-
nes’s first marriage, is old enough to
escape, which she does at the first op-
portunity, marrying and moving to
South Africa. Leek, too, pretty much
gives up on his mother—although more
regretfully, and while still keeping an
eye on his younger brother. But for
poor Shuggie, Agnes remains the cen-
ter of his world. By the age of around
nine, he already knows how to read the
signs when he comes home from school:
“If there was the sound of country gui-
tars and sad melancholy singing, then
the warm moistness of shit would start
to wet his underpants.” Nonetheless, he
always puts her to bed with great gen-tleness and ensures that she has mugs
of water, milk, and the flat leftovers
of Special Brew waiting for her in the
morning. “I’d do anything for you,” he
accurately tells her at one particularly
low point, wrapping himself around
her waist.
And Agnes is not short of low points.
Indeed, the longer the book goes on,
the more you wonder when she’ll reach
rock bottom. Will it be when she shows
up drunk at her dying father’s bedside?
When she’s sick all over one of her gen-
tleman callers? When a frantic Shuggie
tracks her down at a party, and finds
her “half- naked and crumpled” under
the coats in the bedroom? The answer,
in all three cases, is no.
So how is it that Agnes can be so ut-
terly exasperating without ever losing
our sympathy? One obvious reason is
her own distress at her behavior. An-
other is that, as the latest exponent of
Caledonian antisyzygy, she’s capable
of real kindness as well as viciousness.
The kindness tends to come during her
occasional periods of sobriety, when,
to Shuggie’s delight, she makes reso-
lute attempts to be a better mother.
But even in her cups she’s clumsily af-
fectionate to him (some of the time)—
and in one scene she drunkenly takes
her own knickers off and puts them
on her chief nemesis, Colleen, who’s
lying in the street with her genitals ex-
posed. Mostly, however, it’s because of
Stuart’s Grassic Gibbon–like ability to
combine love and horror, and to give
equal weight to both. Not only is Shug-
gie Bain dedicated to his mother, but in
the acknowledgments he writes that “I
owe everything to the memories of my
mother and her struggle”; he’s clearly
determined to give all the contradictory
aspects of that struggle their full due.
Now and again, this leads to some-
thing approaching admiration for Ag-
nes’s refusal to be cowed:Shuggie... understood that this
was where she excelled. Everyday
with the make- up on and her hair
done, she climbed out of her grave
and held her head high. When she
had disgraced herself with drink,
she got up the next day, put on her
best coat, and faced the world.Shuggie also clings, sometimes almost
credibly, to the belief that her cha-
risma and sense of style are enough to
make her feelings of social superiority
to her neighbors not completely delu-
sional. Nevertheless—as Muriel Spark
might have said—it isn’t hard to see the
neighbors’ point of view too, as voiced
with characteristic vigor by Colleen:Walking around thinking yeese
are better than the rest of us, with
yer hairspray and yer handbag
there. Ye... try and rub oor noses
in it, and the whole time yeese are
lying in yer own piss and fucking
other wummin’s men.Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild
contradictions to convincingly co-
exist is also on display in the individ-
ual vignettes that comprise the novel,
blending the tragic with the funny, the
unsparing with the tender, the compas-
sionate with the excruciating. He can
even pull off all of them in a single sen-
tence—as when Agnes decides to go to
AA, not locally but in a posher part of
Glasgow: “It was a fresh start, she hadthought, and hopefully a better class of
alcoholic.”
Unexpectedly, this classier AA does
the trick. Agnes sobers up so success-
fully that she gets a job and a boyfriend,
in the red- headed shape of Colleen’s
brother Eugene, one of the book’s few
decent men—although, in a typically
shrewd psychological aside, Stuart notes
Shuggie’s ambivalence about Eugene’s
benign effect: “She looked as happy as
he could ever remember, and he was
surprised how this hurt. It was all for
the red- headed man. He had done what
Shuggie had been unable to do.”
The trouble is that Eugene can never
believe that his charming Agnes was
once the same “alky hoor” he’d heard
being gossiped about. He’s especially
unsettled by a party to celebrate the
first anniversary of her sobriety, un-
able to accept that she belongs among
the “sad pitiful bastards” (aka her AA
colleagues) he meets there. On their
next night out, to a fancy restaurant,
he persuades her to drink like “nor-
mal people” and join him in a glass of
wine. By the time he gets her home,
she’s already “rolling in and out of a
stupor.” In the teeth of strong compe-
tition, possibly the saddest line in the
novel comes in the final section, back
in 1992, when Shuggie tells his friend
Leanne—another child of an alcoholic
mother—that “my mammy had a good
year once. It was lovely.”
Meanwhile, the other strand of the
book is Shuggie’s own desperation to
be “normal”—because it’s evident to
everybody from early on that he’s gay.
Evident to everybody, that is, except
Shuggie, for whom “something inside
him felt put together incorrectly. It was
like they could all see it, but he was the
only one who could not say what it was.
It was just different, and so it was just
wrong.”
From time to time, Stuart plays
the gayness for laughs. “We need to
talk,” the six- year- old Shuggie tells
his mother publicly when they arrive
at Pithead. “I really do not think I can
live here.” “Wid ye get a load o’ that,”
chuckles one of the onlookers. “Liber-
ace is moving in!” But 1980s Glasgow
is not a place accepting of sexual differ-
ence, even by the person who’s differ-
ent. Shuggie is badly bullied at school,
and not just by the students. In the total
absence of benevolent old dominies,
the best of Shuggie’s teachers let the
bullying go on; the worst join in.
Stuart says that he considers Shug-
gie Bain “a queer novel.” (Rather less
persuasively, the jacket claims a resem-
blance to the work of Alan Holling-
hurst, whose elegant Jamesian fiction
about highly educated gay men has
never shown much interest in Glasgow
housing projects.) But the queerness
plays only a supporting role, at least
until the last sentence, which ends the
book on a note of hesitant, painfully
earned hope that Shuggie may yet be
willing to acknowledge who he is, and
one day even enjoy it. (For the record,
Stuart himself is now a New York fash-
ion designer.) Otherwise, the author
is too generous—and, it would seem,
too fond of his mother—for the central
focus to lie anywhere but in the fierce,
warm- hearted portrait of Agnes in all
her maddening glory. As a result, this
overwhelmingly vivid novel is not just
an accomplished debut. It also feels
like a moving act of filial reverence—if
not, perhaps, of the sort that J. M. Bar-
rie would have recognized. Q(^3) In her play Mary Queen of Scots Got
Her Head Chopped Off, Liz Lochhead,
a former Scottish poet laureate, pro-
vided a guide to Scotland that included
the information, “National flower: the
thistle. National pastime: nostalgia.”
(^4) Both The House with the Green
Shutters and Sunset Song also feature
characters who advertise their social
superiority by trying to speak in an En-
glish accent.
(^5) As Stuart idiomatically notes in his
only other published work, The New
Yorker short story “Found Wanting,”
“It is Glaswegian to like a good drink,
to get blootered, pished, steamboats,
absolutely fucking rat- arsed.”