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Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Oct. 8th, 2022 07:58 pm(I'm not sure how well I can keep this up. A quick skim through my page will tell you that I created this space to write book reviews. That lasted a glorious one post before I gave up. To be fair to me, I was going through a lot earlier this year. I'm still going through a lot but in a completely different category of "a lot". Both are equal shitty times and I'm not sure that I see any semblance of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I've decided to once again pick up book reviewing as a way to distract myself. I am hoping it works. I am also hoping that I can keep this up. Also, I call this a "review" but really I'm just talking about my experience with the book. There won't be any formal assessments because that is frankly out of my depth. I'm just a reader.)
During the first tumultuous half of this year, I drowned my misery by buying a bunch of secondhand books despite the fact that I could barely afford it. Shuggie Bain is the last book that I read out of all those because I heard that it's a depressing read and I didn't want to be even more miserable than I already was. Now that I am out of that pit and into another pit, I thought I couldn't put it off any longer. Turns out I'm perhaps still unprepared for Shuggie Bain. Why am I reading a miserable fucking book when I'm already living a miserable fucking life?
Reading Shuggie Bain is like having someone repeatedly punch you in the guts. In the brief moments of peace you are nevertheless clenching your teeth waiting for the barrage of punches to resume. Unlike A Little Life, though, where it felt like misery for misery's sake, the struggles of poverty and alcoholism feels more raw. There is a claustrophobic quality to living in poverty that was so tangible in the book. The characters never once felt like caricatures. Agnes, especially, with her insistence of keeping a façade of normalcy and even grace when it is obvious to everyone that what is truly going on. Shuggie and his abundance of love for his mother but also perhaps the pride of being a martyr, the slight resentment at having "touched it last". Leek wanting to get away from it all but waiting until the very last straw before he left because despite everything, there is still love in him. Douglas Stuart did such a good job of showing these contradictory emotions and giving his characters depth, a life of their own. There were moments of love and hope that you just want to keep close as proof that sometimes life has something more to offer.
Time flows when you read this book. I just wish I read it at a less difficult time of my life.
