'Young Mungo,' Douglas Stuart's beautiful, brutal second novel after the Booker Prize-winning 'Shuggie Bain,' follows a gay teen romance in Glasgow.
Q&A: Garth Greenwell on writing sex in his novel ‘What Belongs to You’ and the queer literary tradition
To be clear, under no circumstances should you believe that this novel is anything less than bleak. It’s a bloody business being a Glaswegian boy, and “Young Mungo” reads like an emergency room physician’s list of cases: bashed noses, shattered teeth and mangled limbs. Group dynamics revolve around escalating barbarity; it’s a sport and bond. When one boy in Ha-Ha’s crew climbs a ladder to break into a builder’s yard, “the other young men took turns at kicking the bottom of it.
Touch is Stuart’s keenest sense. His Scotland is a place of scratchy wool sweaters, Dr. Scholl’s clogs across the back and pinkie fingers that transmit electricity. Mungo’s body is an ongoing experiment — exposed to every element, stroked by some, “split” by others. Thiscan’t study his way out of the slums. Stuart turns the Victorian novel’s idea of adulthood as redemption into a farce — a body can’t outgrow its own formation.
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