Douglas Stuart’s novel “Shuggie Bain”. Review. – Culture

The literature of the new social naturalism, which was popularized in France by Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon and in Germany has its representatives in Deniz Ohde and Christian Baron, usually appears ascetic. The texts themselves are not furnished more opulently than the social housing in which the protagonists live, the temperature is turned down, as if the novel itself ran out of electricity before the month was over. There is a renunciation of illusions that is trained in epic theater. As in a literary white cube, language elegantly steps aside so as not to obscure the subject. With Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize winning debut novel “Shuggie Bain”, which at first glance originates from the same school, things are now clearly different.

The novel is set in Glasgow in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms have just made entire neighborhoods unemployed, alcoholism and depression are rampant, and suicide rates are rising dramatically. The shock sits deep in the bones of the once proud steel and dock workers and when they drink their first beers on the roadside in the morning, they still wear their work jackets as if the next shift was imminent. The lettering above the entrance gates of the factories is yellowing and those who are not completely lost to the alcohol take a taxi to the better areas.

In this environment, the Protestant Agnes McGowan marries the Catholic “Big Shug” Bain, who is also a taxi driver. From a first marriage with a good Protestant with little imagination, “who knew how lucky he was with Agnes, and therefore carried her on his hands”, she already has two children, but she could not bear the monotony of her everyday family life and leaves her husband to the horror of the parents for Big Shug. Together they have another child, the main character of the novel. It bears his father’s name, Shuggie Bain.

The central stylistic device is the grotesque malevolence of the characters

The family lives with Agnes ‘parents, a total of seven people crowd into the small workers’ apartment. Shug often stays with one of his mistresses. He soon persuades Agnes to finally move into her own apartment, finds her accommodation in Pithead, a run-down former workers’ settlement on the outskirts of the city, and only tells her there that he will not move into the new apartment himself.

At this point a central stylistic device of the novel appears for the first time: the excessive, grotesque malignancy of individual figures, the frosty absence of grace. The characters are in a dry way cruel to each other: the neighbors tirelessly beat each other down, the classmates humiliate the effeminate Shuggie, at some point the rapes in this novel are no longer counted.

Douglas Stuart, however, has not written a political novel; the malevolence of his characters has something intrinsic, absolute, fairytale-like about it. When Big Shug handed his family over to the dusty hole on the outskirts of the city to be forgiven immediately to one of his numerous lovers, Douglas Stuart relates it this way: “Agnes grabbed his sweater collar. Shug grabbed his money belt and kissed it vigorously with his tongue . He had to crush the tiny bones of her hand for her to let go. She had loved him, and he had to break her completely before leaving her for good. Agnes Bain was too precious a specimen to be left to the love of another. He wasn’t even allowed to leave broken pieces that someone else could later collect and glue. ” The plan works: Agnes breaks up, from now on her alcohol addiction determines her everyday life.

After this exposition, most of the book is about the agony Agnes spent the years in Pithead. Stuart tells of this directionless decline mainly from the personal perspective of the youngest son Shuggie, who is only six or seven years old at the beginning, but has to get older very quickly because of his mother’s helplessness. When she’s drunk, he has to hide the razor blades, keep them away from the door, get rid of neighbors ringing. He is her caretaker and guardian of her intoxication at the same time.

The novel devotes hundreds of pages to the numb regularity in the daily routine of the alcoholic Agnes Bain. In front of her little son, she behaves as if she were unobserved, which is why the childlike gaze becomes a clinical instrument of truth. The narrative perspective is not always plausible, Stuart cheerfully changes perspectives, sometimes within individual paragraphs, but it was still enough for the Booker Prize. The translator Sophie Zeitz would have deserved her own prize, who translated the Glaswegian steelworker dialect into a placeless proletarian German that sounds like Rostock and Bottrop, like Rothmann and Grass at the same time, but actually does the trick of not becoming regionalism.

A day in Agnes Bain’s life usually starts with the fact that she wakes up on the sofa fully dressed, has a dry mouth and has to gag because the bile is burning in her throat. The telephone receiver is still hanging on her arm because at night, when she has drunk close to unconsciousness, she always calls people whom she blames for her fate and whom she insults: old school friends, neighbors, the taxi radio. Then she listens to the pounding in her head for a while. Then she realizes that the house is empty and that the boy has apparently gone to school alone again.

He transfers the dissolution of social contradictions into opulence from fashion to novels

Then she lights a cigarette and goes in search of half-full bottles, cans, and teacups, all the while making “shrill, slurping noises of anger through her front teeth”. When the welfare, which is paid on Mondays, is used up, she breaks open the gas meter and carries the coins to the shop. The rest of the month it will be cold again in the apartment. And when Shuggie gets home after school, he’ll find her so drunk again that he doesn’t even ask for food, but hides in his tiny room from her aimless anger.

The peculiarity of the novel is that it linguistically contrasts this depraved way of life, which is permanently on the edge of the animal and the creature, with operatic, opulent images and an iron will to beauty. When Shug beats his wife up again at one point, pulls her to the floor by her hair and slams the door on the back of her head, “like she’s a stubborn rug,” then kicks her chin, cracking her “pearly white skin” , Agnes lies at the end of the paragraph “glittering and fluffy on the floor like a discarded party dress”.

Alcohol has robbed Agnes of all personality traits, but she remains exceptionally beautiful until the end. Shuggie Bain can’t get enough of her, he experiences her as flawless and angelic, as a Scottish undine. Last but not least, her will to be beautiful has a moral dimension: in the eyes of her son, it raises her above the neighbors, who hardly even bother to get out of their pajamas before they meet on the curb to have their cigarettes. Agnes, on the other hand, doesn’t let anything come of her appearance, even if there’s no more food in the house and Shuggie drinks a few sips of strong beer after school to calm the rumbling of his empty stomach. Before she leaves the house, she puts on earrings and lipstick, pulls on her good coat, and glues the stripes of her tights.

Open detailed view

Douglas Stuart worked full-time as a fashion designer in New York for two decades, including for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. The American Vogue he said in an interview after the Booker Prize that he was primarily interested in fashion because it “can tell stories”. In “Shuggie Bain” he transfers the principle of dissolving social contradictions into opulence back to the novel form, which is why it now largely looks as if Tyler Mitchell had photographed the Glasgow workers’ settlements. From an art-philosophical point of view, the gesture is not entirely uninteresting: is there in opulent beauty, in the effect, in the illusion ultimately a redeeming power, a form of empowerment that is able to banish existential hardships, also in literature? In Germany, Friedrich Schiller believed precisely that for a long time.

In any case, Agnes Bain looks like a “goddess of roses” when she marches through her slum to the liquor store with her head held high and with fresh nail polish, the “red veins from the years of winter and drinking shone happily on her cheeks. It was as if she had personally painted and brought to life Walt Disney, a solid, smoking version of Snow White “. If the size of an author is measured by the fearlessness with which he approaches the cliché, even the kitsch, then a great author is born with this debut.