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A review by moirastone
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
4.0
Back in January of 2020, I stood still as a post in my kitchen, eyes closed, afraid to read the next sentence of the story in that week's New Yorker. In the space of a page, maybe less, I had lost myself to a young man's queasy, near-annihilating desire to be seen and touched, and if the date he was on with an older man was about to take a bad turn I knew it would crush me. I clutched the magazine in my fist and shoved it in the recycling bin. I don't think it was more than a quarter hour before I knelt on the floor, fished it out, and finished the story there in front of the bin.
That push-pull is how I read Shuggie Bain, the novel that story is excerpted (in a way) from. I would read a hundred pages in a gulp, and then abruptly slam up against an image of beauty or pain that would drive me from the book for days.
It's astonishing and brutal, and like another debut novel that kept me in a pained thrall, I cannot say that I did something so banal as enjoy it; I consumed and was consumed and feel lucky to have finished it without damage.
That push-pull is how I read Shuggie Bain, the novel that story is excerpted (in a way) from. I would read a hundred pages in a gulp, and then abruptly slam up against an image of beauty or pain that would drive me from the book for days.
It's astonishing and brutal, and like another debut novel that kept me in a pained thrall, I cannot say that I did something so banal as enjoy it; I consumed and was consumed and feel lucky to have finished it without damage.