Shuggie Bain Makes It Out
First-time novelist Douglas Stuart’s unsparing account of a life not unlike his own might be the best-reviewed book you’ve not yet read in 2020.
Douglas Stuart’s neo-Dickensian debut
Shuggie bain is 5, prissy, and precise. “We need to talk,” he tells his mother, Agnes, when the family moves to a sooty coal village on the outskirts of Glasgow. “I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. It’s simply unpossible.” Shuggie abhors everything he deems “common”; he’s the type to stamp his wee foot. He is a creature entirely out of place, a changeling who speaks like a prince. His family smells his inevitable truth, powerless as they are to stop it. “You’ll be needing that nipped in the bud,” his grandmother says. “It’s no right.”
Much is no right in the neo-Dickensian Glasgow of Shuggie Bain, a novel that seems almost more comfortable in a previous century than in our own—no metafictional contortions, no genre-dabbling. It’s a fat-doorstop trudge of perseverance through the alcoholic grimness of poverty and addiction. It is also on a very short list, amid a very dissimilar cohort, of the year’s breakout debuts, in contention for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, both announced later this month. And because of an accident of timing—it was released right before the start of the pandemic—it might be the best-reviewed book you’ve never heard of in 2020, having had other things on your mind.
This was not the plan for its writer, Douglas Stuart, but this is the year of not-asplanned. He had begun 2020 with as many good omens as a writer could wish for: a story in The New Yorker in January (his firstever published piece of fiction), good reviews all around for Shuggie Bain on its arrival in February. For Stuart, who had spent ten years chipping away at a draft at night, on weekends, on planes, and in foreign hotel rooms during business trips, it was the realization of a long-deferred dream. At the age of 43 (he has since turned 44), 20 years into a career as a fashion designer, a trade he learned as a way out of the Glasgow where, like Shuggie, he spent a misfit youth, he was an author at last.
Stuart has a kind, indrawn manner and a Scottish burr softened, though not evicted, by decades of living in New York. “All you really want is for it to find the reader in the world,” he said over coffee on a bleary, damp gray day in October—Glaswegian weather, though he was sitting only a few blocks from his apartment on Avenue C. “It doesn’t have to be many, but you just want it to sort of join the world.” But within a month of publication, “the world shut down,” Stuart said. “I mean, my book is the least of anybody’s worries. But certainly, for a debut novelist, you rely so much on people being able to see your book in a store and be curious about it. And so it sort of was—‘swallowed up’ is the best way to say it. And so I just went into a period of grieving a little bit.”
At the book’s center is Agnes Bain, an imperious former beauty in a now-ratty mink whose disintegration is observed lovingly but unsparingly. Her youngest, Shuggie, bobs in her beery wake, no more able to save her than his baby doll, Daphne. (“I admire things that are unflinching,” Stuart said.) Shuggie Bain is not a memoir, but the parallels between author and subject are many. “If you’ve ever loved someone with an addiction,” he said, “you’ve developed a lot of strategies to save them from themselves and also to protect yourself. My mother always felt so hard done to in life and so overlooked—she was never voiceless, but she felt voiceless, I think. And so I used to sit down, and I would say, ‘Let me write your book.’ And she would love that.” They never got farther than the dedication: “To Elizabeth Taylor, who thinks she does, but knows nothing about the cruelties of love.” Stuart’s writing began there.
His father was never in his life, so after his mother’s death, from her addiction, when he was 16, he lived first with his older brother and then on his own in a boardinghouse. He was encouraged by teachers to read. But to study literature was classinflected in the U.K. A trade was safer, and he had learned the basics of knitting at his mother’s knee. He got into a textile program, paying for his board with a job managing supermarket checkout counters. A master’s degree in menswear at the Royal College of Art in London followed. He was hired from the graduation show in 2000 by Calvin Klein in New York, then moved on to Ralph Lauren (where “you couldn’t make something too expensive”—quite a change from how he grew up). Then he spent 15 years at Banana Republic. While working there in 2008, as the financial crisis set the world soul-searching, he began sketching out characters and scenes. He told almost no one. Eventually, the first draft of Shuggie Bain grew to 900 pages. It was cathartic to write it. “Americans express themselves,” he said. “Men from the west coast of Scotland, we’re not allowed to ever think of ourselves as exceptionally hard done to or exceptionally talented because we are one of many.” Stuart’s husband, Michael Cary, a curator at Gagosian, learned a lot about him reading the drafts.
Stuart’s project as a writer is in part about clearing space for tenderness among men, space for love. (His second novel is about a romance between two boys on opposite sides of sectarian violence in ’90s Scotland.) But it is also about making room for an honest depiction of working-class life. “There’s a sort of a pressure on working-class stories to not tell the truth with too much reality.” To avoid “misery porn,” but also tell the truth when the reader is likely middle class. “People like to sort of come along and gawp at the sad bits,” he said. “And then go back to worrying about, you know, Do they have almond milk?”
We were sitting at an East Village terrace café; suddenly, a patio umbrella broke free of its mooring and crashed onto the sidewalk. Stuart laughed: “Maybe it was my mother reaching out.” To say what? Shuggie Bain is dedicated to her. How would she feel to be refracted into Agnes Bain, whose pride was her calling card, whose illness was her downfall? “She felt so unseen in life. I think my mother would be thrilled.” ■