Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

 

Shuggie is a Scottish boy, named after his father, Big Shug.  He lives with his grandparents, mother, father, sister and brother in a tenement flat.  His father is a taxi driver; his mother stays at home.  Shug is her second husband and Shuggie's brother and sister are from her first marriage.  Shug hates living with his in-laws and he convinces Agnes, the mother, to move to a new flat a few miles away.  The surprise is that when the family gets there, Big Shug doesn't move in.  He has found a new woman and leaves the family there with no transportation.

The other big fact about Shuggie's life is that Agnes drinks.  Not a little bit but a lot.  She regularly gets so drunk that she passes out.  She spends the welfare money on drink, leaving the children with no food in the house.  She alternates between treating them as small children and over loving them or ignoring them or cursing them when the drink is on her.  This is the normal for Shuggie as he has never known anything else.  He believes that it is his job to make Agnes better no matter what price that extracts from him. 

Shuggie is a kind boy, a boy who thinks of others.  The kids at school call him posh and accuse him of being gay and maybe he is; he's not sure about any of that.  As the years go by, first his sister and then his brother leave to try to make their own lives.  Shuggie is the one who stays by Agnes as she is taken advantage of by men, as she drinks up everything they own.  He feeds her when there is food in the house, he draws her baths, he undresses her and puts her to bed.  But he never loses hope and he never loses the kindness in his heart.

This book won the 2020 Booker award.  I listened to it and the narrator's Scottish brogue added to my enjoyment of the novel.  This is a novel that will stick in the reader's mind and Shuggie and his determination to rise above his circumstances will endear him to readers and make him memorable. Although the story is bleak, no one will regret meeting Shuggie.   This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.