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Can I smell this public rose? Can I smile in the street?

Photo of me :) by Tamar Shlaim

The working-class Glaswegian families of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain abandon each other with miraculous ease: in the slums and SROs of Thatcherite Scotland, sisters betray brothers, fathers belt daughters, husbands deceive wives. Everyone is drunk or high or dissociated, and all are prone to random violence, beatings and sexual assault sometimes doled out with a mourning as disconcerting as glee. They drink and despair and self-destruct (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes not). 

Dramatic as Shuggie is, for the first hundred or so pages, I thought it had been overhyped. My friend, Liz, who has great taste, raved about the 2020 Booker winner. It was well-paced -and constructed, I reckoned, and certainly entertaining—in the sense that it held my attention—but stylistically, I found it somewhat bland. Good? Yes. Excellent? I wasn’t convinced.