fatma's Reviews > Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain is one of those novels where, for me, the form let down the content. This is a story about alcoholism, abuse, and poverty, and it is unremitting in its depiction of those things. For all its heavy subject matter, though, it left me largely impassive. It felt like the more the narrative wanted me to feel, the less I actually felt.

The crux of my problem with this novel is its form--that is, its narrative structure and writing style. The writing in Shuggie Bain falls under the weight of its story, not necessarily on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but on a more holistic level.

The narrative, here, suffers from a kind of stasis: it's repetitive, lacking dynamism in both character and plot. Over and over again we see Agnes, the main character in Shuggie Bain aside from Shuggie himself, engage in the same cycle of abuse: she drinks, she gets herself into increasingly precarious situations, she tries to quit drinking, she is seemingly on the mend, and then she relapses. Of course, I can recognize that this kind of cycle exists for many of those who have struggled with substance abuse; I never expected Agnes to get over years of substance abuse after a single attempt to quit drinking. My issue is that narratively, it didn't make for very engaging reading. It's one thing to be reading about the same plot point happening over and over again; it's another thing to have that plot point be about substance abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. The end result was that not only did I start to get impatient with the novel, but I also just started to feel increasingly distanced from and indifferent to its story.

More than that, though, I felt like I never got to know the characters beyond their suffering. There were a few scenes here and there that had genuinely earnest and caring character interactions, but beyond that it was just more of the same: characters either inflicting or being subjected to abuse.

To put it simply, Shuggie Bain largely prioritized the situational over the psychological: the overwhelming need to buy alcohol when you're already extremely financially straitened, the binge drinking and subsequent blackouts, the vulnerability that comes with being a child of an alcoholic mother. What I wanted from Shuggie Bain was to emphasize the psychological alongside the situational, to give me a closer look into the thoughts and emotions of its characters, to make me feel like I knew them and not just the things they did or the things that happened to them.

I want to tread carefully here because I don't want my criticism of this book to be "it was too depressing." Depressing things happen in the world; it feels like a bit of a disservice to call experiences that many people have gone through "too depressing," especially for a novel like this where, I believe, at least some of the story is autobiographical. My problem is not that it was a depressing story, but that it wasn't a particularly well told one.

I know I've been talking about the form and content of a novel as if they're two separate things, but really when it comes down to it, they're inextricable. The content doesn't exist without the form. When a story isn't told well, it doesn't matter how good or bad it is; the end result is just a poorly told story.

(Thanks so much Grove Atlantic for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!)