Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her—even her beloved Shuggie. Shuggie Bain was discussed in our 6th virtual meeting during the COVID pandemic. She left the father of her two older children, Catherine and Leek, before they could remember what he looked like. He battles to support her as she repeatedly trips and falls on her addiction, and the rest of her family abandons her. Agnes clung to him, and together they watched all this new beauty in silence. Shuggie will knock you sideways." Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. It’s their shared experience as outsiders that pulls Shuggie most deeply into Agnes’s orbit out of his three siblings, the pair clinging to each other as the book hurtles towards its inevitable conclusion. Read the full review. One day, he walks through the door. Shuggie Bain was discussed in our 6th virtual meeting during the COVID pandemic. Wullie picks him up and ‘the baby’s pink arms reached out to him, like it knew and trusted the deep well of goodness from which Wullie Campbell had sprung.’ He puts the boy in his pram, goes out for a walk and returns alone. He drags Shuggie from the room. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross.) . Moving to London to undertake a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, he was tapped by recruiters from Calvin Klein in the final weeks of his course and moved to New York in 2000. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Big Shug is a taxi driver, but his philandering behavior is driving Agnes into a depression. Still, he describes it as a process not dissimilar to therapy; his first draft, brimming with childhood memories, was 900 pages long. Her second husband, Hugh Bain, known as Shug, is a Glasgow cab driver, an adulterer and a Protestant. Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020.It tells the story of the youngest of the three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother, Agnes, in the 1980s, in a post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland. Agnes is a glamorous, proud woman who can be funny, charming, and beautiful; and she is an alcoholic. She is devoted to her second husband Shug who treats her cruelly. “My idea of absolute heaven was being on a long-haul flight to China and suddenly having 16 hours where my team couldn’t get in touch with me. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. The novel is full of on-the-nose dialogue of this sort. “Fashion had always drawn me to it by its ability to tell stories, but I think over the past decade, we’ve lost the ability to listen to stories through fashion,” he says. Although Shuggie Bain is not an autobiography, it borrows heavily from Douglas’ life. However you worry that the ending will be horrific and they both go down the tubes as her life is an alcoholic, green, smoky haze. . It wouldn’t be right to describe Shuggie Bain as a book for children, as the critic Jessa Crispin recently said of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The Editor Released to strong reviews in February, the book gained momentum as a word-of-mouth hit during lockdown, attracting praise not only for Stuart’s window into the plague of unemployment and working-class disillusionment wrought by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government but also, perhaps more importantly, for the empathy that radiates from every page. Ad Choices. The answer is: not really. Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. . The city is glimpsed, as are Shuggie’s emerging artistic sensibilities and sense of his own sexuality, but only just. Writing much of his dialogue in the Glasgow patter, Stuart has an ear for the city’s particular blend of warmth, savagery, and wit, even as his story’s more shocking scenes picture a generation devastated by very specific social circumstances. I ruined many a summer holiday by asking my husband to go somewhere and then sitting at a desk the whole time,” he adds, laughing. “I had some teachers at my high school who saw this kid who suddenly was orphaned and was living by himself in a bedsit, working four nights a week and all day Saturday and Sunday, but trying to get some kind of qualifications, and they turned me towards textiles,” Stuart remembers. ‘Am I to beat this selfish devil out of you?’ he asks. Stuart paints a picture of a young man on society’s margins with the eagle-eyed precision of someone who has not just lived it but truly absorbed it, regurgitating its grimier details as he guides readers through the landscape of 1980s postindustrial Scotland and explains how Shuggie arrived here. “The body—especially the body in pain—blazes on the pages of Shuggie Bain . The 2 main characters are Shuggie and Agnes where their relationship is incredibly intense and wonderfully close. The book opens the curtain on the world after the social worker has gone home. Family is a theme that endures throughout, and yet no conventional nuclear set-up is ever described. Over the years that followed, even after shifting to a role at Gap, Stuart grew frustrated. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Despite his behavior, Shuggie remains unwavering towards him. “But because working-class voices are often marginalized and regional stories are often overlooked, I don’t think in history we look at those enough. ‘What man takes a baby and just makes it go away?’ she thinks while drunk. This is the world of Shuggie Bain, a little boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Lizzie locks the toddler Agnes in a cupboard, goes to the bedroom and takes off her clothes. All but one of her children have been driven away by her deterioration, and that child, Despite the horrors he recounts in the book, Stuart is firm in his belief that it is ultimately a “love story.”, “It’s gratifying that people have been able to break it and understand the love, the hope, and the humanity in the characters, but it makes me a little blue sometimes when I see how relevant the book is today,” says Stuart. Shuggie is tormented at school and in the neighbourhood. Agnes and her son, Shuggie, survive through social instability, generational poverty, addiction and abuse, a world in which Shuggie must come … In a flashback we see him rape her on a seaside holiday (after dragging her upstairs by the hair, angry that she’s made a drunken scene). ‘He was never any use at all that pulling out nonsense … He would have had a hundred if he could. Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain to be turned into TV series by Hollywood producers ... and to celebrate the love and hope between Shuggie and Agnes." When he brings her home drunk, Leek beats him up. “What good was a soft boy in a hard world?” Shuggie’s older half-brother, Leek, says of the boy as a six-year-old; his love for dancing, playing with dolls, and instinctive aversion to football are quickly identified by those around him as “no right.” His mother, Agnes, is glamorous, charismatic, and an alcoholic, her addiction becoming an all-consuming force that her loved ones must either grapple with or eventually give up on. To the extent that it engages in adult psychology, the mentality portrayed is either vicious and predatory (Shug) or victimised (Agnes). Even that wasn’t enough to keep you still.’. In a drunken stupor, Agnes dies after dripping her saliva. As a woman at her AA meeting says: ‘The bastards couldnae burn Saint Agnes, so they beheaded the poor lassie instead. Shuggie is different. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. © 2021 Condé Nast. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. The heart-wrenching story tells of the unconditional love between Agnes Bain — set on a descent into alcoholism by the tough circumstances life has dealt her — and her youngest son. Nobody could. “The body—especially the body in pain—blazes on the pages of Shuggie Bain . He would have been scared, but his mother seemed completely calm, and the room was never more beautiful, as the light cast dancing shadows on the walls and the paisley wallpaper came alive, like a thousand smoky fishes. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the consciousness of a young boy: the wonder of childhood is there as well as paternal abuse. He is the child of Agnes and Shug Bain. Agnes is a glamorous, proud woman who can be funny, charming, and beautiful; and she is an alcoholic. When Agnes, unconscious on the bed, finally comes to, she asks him: ‘Where the fuck have you been?’. Wife died on the. It seems appropriate, then, that Stuart lends the kind of cinematic sweep usually reserved for historical figures like Thatcher to the women who populate Shuggie Bain. 4 stars out of 5. Fuckin’ men! They both move to a new neighborhood, and Agnes promises to stop drinking alcohol, but being unable to change their circumstances, their relationship becomes strained, as Shuggie grows older. “It was never hard to reconnect with the world because the world was inside me.” While Margaret Thatcher is mentioned throughout, her presence is felt rather than seen, as her policies of privatizing infrastructure and reducing the power of trade unions cast a long shadow over the book’s characters. She looked at the light for a moment, and her voice cracked with the poor me’s as she sang along with the cassette. But there is a sense that someone did her in. So too does the book feel cinematic in a more literal sense, following the seam of Glaswegian kitchen-sink realism that courses through some of the most memorable British films of the past few decades, from Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher to Andrea Arnold’s Red Road to Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe. ‘Let Jamesy McAvennie hear,’ she says, ‘that his. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light b But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. One day he is rolled in a barrel by local bullies. Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. The dysfunction in the family compels Catherine, Shuggie’s half-sister, to get married in South Africa. ‘Shhh, now be a big boy for your mammy.’ There was a dead calmness in her eyes. The book is a thinly disguised autobiography. Alex Preston. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n23/christian-lorentzen/saint-agnes-s-lament Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is a hard hitting story about poverty, alcoholism and isolation. There’s a lot of child rape – at the hands of monks, johns, an evil doctor – in Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but it’s told through the recollections of a prosperous attorney living a tony lifestyle in perpetual boom-era Manhattan. The curtains were almost gone, they dripped like ice cream onto the carpet. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. While there are a number of important deviations from Stuart’s own story—his father disappeared when he was a boy, for example, unlike the looming, malevolent presence of Shuggie’s father “Big Shug” in the novel—the similarities of their experiences outweigh the differences. At its heart, the book is an ode to the tenacity and resilience of working-class Scottish women during that tumultuous period. I’ll never forget Shuggie and Agnes or the incredibly detailed Glasgow they inhabit. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. Because there is a craft to writing where you start on the tiniest sentence level and you build and you build and you build.”, Although Stuart was first taught to knit by his mother at the age of six or seven, it wasn’t until his high school years—after the industries that had traditionally powered the Scottish economy had been decimated by the Thatcher government—that Stuart recognized making clothing as a viable career. London Review of Books The novel is dedicated to his late mother, referenced respectfully only as AED. Agnes, Shuggie’s mother, is in her second marriage to Shug Bain, a protestant and womaniser. Douglas Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain, was the unanimous winner of the annual prize of £50,000, and the keys to a prestigious career in the world of storytelling. But sober she’s envious that her mother was loved by her father in a way Shug has never loved her. But for all of his accolades and milestones—just last week it was announced that A24 and Scott Rudin would be adapting Shuggie Bain for TV—Stuart admits that the strangest thing has been watching everything happen from his sofa in New York. And yet, throughout the story, tragedy is counterbalanced by light: the way Shuggie loves Agnes, with a love against hope, until events have run their course. To calm the depression, Agnes seeks solace in alcohol. (Loach even sent Stuart a fan letter after reading the book earlier this year.) At the time of our interview, this Glasgow-set saga about young Shuggie and his beautiful, glorious, incorrigibly alcoholic mother, Agnes, has been published in 37 languages. “I did see her as the heroine of her own movie, but Shuggie doesn’t think about himself that way—he’s sort of the costar in his mother’s movie, and then there’s the chorus all around them.”, He continues, “The book is written in these scenes or vignettes, these little encapsulated moments because sometimes that’s what it’s like to love an addict. On Sunday morning, he packs up some tomato sandwiches, sunglasses, and a robot action figure to share with the other kids. Raw, formidable, bursting with tenderness and frailty. Shuggie Bain is often subjected to such pointed observation: he is an outsider, jutting against the grain of his surroundings, even as he tries, heartbreakingly hard, to fit in. One morning Agnes decides that Shuggie could use a father figure and asks James McAvennie, a neighbour from across the road, to take him fishing with his kids (who also happen to be Shuggie’s main tormentors), offering him a few pounds, which he rejects. Reading the book from Agnes’s perspective is to understand the role played by the two Shuggie Bains we meet. “I had a glass of Champagne and listened to some Belle and Sebastian in my kitchen,” Stuart says. Please include name, address, and a telephone number. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her—even her beloved Shuggie. Agnes used her free arm and pulled him tighter towards her. The intense interest in the book, particularly in Britain, is due in part to its worrying parallels with the present day. Agnes has turned to alcohol, thus, becoming a shadow of former self. So before getting serious with her, he wanted to see if Agnes could have an occasional drink and not have a problem with it anymore, "because it's what normal people do". It’s not for nothing that the woman she models herself after most closely is Elizabeth Taylor. Agnes’ behavior forces her first two children to plot their escape. In the final third of the novel, the gothic elements of Stuart’s realism fall away – though there is more molestation and sexual assault to come – and the book begins to feel like a therapeutic memoir informed by the coping techniques of survivors. He shook his head, and as he spoke he prodded himself in the chest. Eh?’. “I didn’t get to spend any time with the other wonderful Booker finalists or with the judges. This is the rare contemporary novel … ‘I am tired of you coming first, Agnes. Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire. When Lizzie asks him where her baby is, he replies: ‘What baby?’. “When we, to all intents and purposes, think we’re moving forward as a society, we’re overlooking an awful lot of people who are struggling and are left behind, and we still have an incredibly unfeeling government when it comes to that,” Stuart continues. There’s such unpredictability to addiction, and [life] often feels like a non sequitur. She attracts other alcoholics and they all help each other downwards in a never-ending spiral of hangovers and desperation. The father and son are, fittingly, two polar opposites; a ying and yang; the devil and the angel on Agnes’s shoulders. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. The wonder is how crazily, improbably alive it all is . I'll be thinking and talking about Shuggie Bain - and teaching it - for quite some time. Agnes, who during times of clarity strives to better herself with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, gradually finds herself sidelined by an indifferent and dysfunctional social care system. “Not only was it a creative outlet, but it was also a flourishing Scottish trade. Scott Rudin and Eli Bush will produce. Shuggie and Leek learn to undress Agnes after a night out, to look away from her bruised thighs and gouged breasts, to catch vomit and wipe bile. The scene takes a nightmarish turn: Agnes reached across the mattress for her cigarettes, she lit one and sucking loudly, she coaxed the end into a blazing copper tip. Set in the early 1980s Shuggie Bain opens with a group of women sitting around a table playing cards for pin money.Agnes, daughter of Liz, is one of these women. Colleen says that after the birth of her fifth child she refused to sleep with James. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run. I’m 39!’ she says. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is a hard hitting story about poverty, alcoholism and isolation. The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos on Vogue.com. ‘I even thought, maybe if I gave you a wean of my own, but no. The room turned golden. ‘It’s Saint Agnes’s lament.’) They are saved by Shug, who puts out the fire with wet towels, burning himself in the process. I’m no saying there’s nothing ye can do for me.’ After they have sex, she takes a bath (to get the grease off her skin – James is a mechanic) and cries because she’s only ever slept with her two husbands. With Agnes ’ behavior forces her first two children to plot their escape and on. Tend to lapse into something awful after reading the book, particularly in Britain, is due in part its! 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