The Performance of Pride

Issue 257

New York City, 2024

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There’s a revealing moment about halfway through Douglas Stuart’s novel Shuggie Bain that passes without much notice. An awkward boy, the eponymous Shuggie Bain, dances for his mother in their small, mold-encrusted council house, his dance a rare moment of abandon, of forgetting life’s troubles. In a novel without much pleasure, here’s one exhale amid the squalor and pain and fear. At least until Shuggie becomes aware that he’s being watched through the front window, watched by neighbors who already terrorize his days.

He looked at his mother; when had she noticed? She only looked up at him and took a draw on her fag. Without looking out the window she spoke through clenched teeth. ‘If I were you, I would keep dancing.’

This is a mother who begins in a rather sordid place and uses that foundation to dive even lower. The proximate cause is alcohol, but the bottles that she hides underneath the sink and behind the sofa and in the bathroom and inside her purse and in her mugs eventually seem more like excuses for larger, more fundamental, sorrows, the liquid a method of accelerating the desire to drown. Yet his mother never forgets—amid her sweating, shakes, and smell—the weight of appearances. You could make a reasonable argument that maintaining a mask amid your degradation, however ineffectual, points to a desire for something better. That it is a depressing sign of surrender once you stop caring about the face you display for the world. And you could also make a reasonable argument that she’s correct in telling Shuggie to keep dancing: the bullies have already witnessed the dance, that truth can’t be escaped, so it is now his decision whether they also witness his humiliation.

She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.

In this Booker Prize winning novel, we’re in Glasgow, it’s the 1980s, and we’re mostly following a mother and her three children, with Shuggie Bain the youngest and most prominent in the narrative. The reader knows that Shuggie’s sexuality doesn’t match what’s expected and that’s one reason why he’s abused, though he’s too young to realize that truth. The reader knows that the poverty and violence and hardship that surrounds him, in Glasgow, is some of the worst in Western Europe, but he’s too young to discern its uniqueness. The reader also knows that his mother, who is both proud and pitiful, isn’t helping young Shuggie by holding him so close, in expecting him to dress and feed and comfort her, but he’s too young to want anything but her happiness.

What he does perceive, however, are the subtleties of appearances. In some ways this is a necessary consequence of the danger that surrounds him: one way to amplify your ability to discern human emotion and the nuances underneath behaviors is to confront a world of threats. This takes time, and the novel is partly a harrowing account of this education, with his graceful walk and peculiar voice a vulnerability that makes him a visible target—for bullies, for abusers. At first this is merely a defensive technique, a method for him to identify when an appearance doesn’t match its reality, when a taxi driver, or a schoolmaster, or another child, is a potential danger, though Shuggie soon learns how often everyone in his world puts on a mask.

She strutted out a confident rhythmic clip and turned her head and said to the boy, “What would you like for your dinner tonight?” Shuggie looked up at his mother and did as he had been taught. “Roast chicken, please. I’m a bit tired of sirloin every other night.” They passed the women, who stopped their own conversation, and Agnes said with a light laugh, “Oh, you! You will have steak again and be thankful!”

Is there an endpoint? Is there a way out from the squalor? The endless tales of bottles drunk and unfed stomachs and missed schooldays do begin to drag—there’s a relentlessness, a futility, to the suffering that rightly feels numbing. For every character in these pages, the horizon appears predictable, purposeless, so that there’s no changes to circumstances regardless of where you travel. Careful readers will notice how both the beginning and the ending of the novel show children looking at expansive views—with nothing but poverty and pain in the distance. Careful readers will also notice that two characters just might have escaped these circumstances, but the only clue of that fact is that they simply disappear from the narrative, the gravitational pull of these neighborhoods so strong that you must sever your link to escape. Which means that the only way out is to leave the novel, although Shuggie’s mother does try, twice, to adjust their situation by moving across town.

His mother lay back on the carpet with a huff. She turned and ran her eyes the length of him. “So, who do you want to be when we move?”

How do you act when you’re ashamed? What do you present the world when you have nothing to present? Should you be ashamed of the poverty that surrounds you? Of your sexuality?

Then when Leek asked him how he was, Shuggie would say he was doing fine, because he had learned that was what his brother wanted to hear. They would both pretend to be fine…

This novel does a remarkable job of capturing a Glaswegian vernacular with precision—how the dialogue moves across the page in a guttural, gravelly patter, immersing you in the environment. And that accomplishment is almost certainly vital for its effectiveness, as this precision of place provides an almost claustrophobic sensation, a sensation that these characters are confined to their environment, they’re trapped, really, inside the narrative.

Shuggie is the one exception to this speech pattern, as he uses the same words but speaks in a higher pitch, identifying himself, instantly, as different, as unusual, as not quite right. You might say that in some ways this novel is about appearances—how poverty appears, how sexuality appears—and how those appearances mask underlying truths and underlying desires. Then you might revise that statement and say that, in some ways, every novel is about appearances.