WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in ...

First things first. Stuart can write beautifully and with honesty. While we had a lot of different takes on this book in our group, the one thing we kept coming back to, and the thing that made the lowest review in the group pretty good and the highest amazing, was that Stuart created very believeble and very compelling scenes and characters. In many ways, this is a novel about how addiction, particularly alcoholism, destroys people, but to Stuart, that's a very specific addiction to very specific people. Agnes, the mother of Shuggie, is just an incredibly well-rendered character -- complex, admirable in ways, frustrating, and human. The fact that we kept hoping for the best for Agnes despite her failures and that we keep taking her side despite her horrible acts of selfishness is testament to how vividly Stuart created that character. This vividness is all over the novel -- in Shug (Shuggie's dad) and his new family, in the community that Agnes moves to in both the houses and the tenement, in the arc of Agnes's relationship with Eugene, in Shuggie's friendship with Leanne. A lot of our conversation looked at the different children's reactions to Agnes and asked about the ethics of support. Was Leek's statement that Shuggie had to save himself true or selfish? Could we see Shuggie's extreme attempts to help his mother in her worst state enabling or noble? A lot of us defended Catherine's decision to leave and came to the conclusion that the children were just doing what they had to in order to survive. This highlighted another of the strengths of the novel. Stuart has a very interesting take on perspective. The book orbits around Agnes and Shuggie, and when other characters are in their lives (e.g. Shug, Leek, Catherine) we get a sense of their interiority, but when they leave the central orbit, they disappear completely. This is a wonderful convention, giving Stuart the ability let us understand Eugene's disgusted at the 'broken' people at AA or the danger Catherine is in of sexual violence that onl curbed by giving the right answer to a question of allegience, but then making those characters unknowable when they no longer inhabit Shuggie's life very beautifully reflects the protagonists' ignorance of their lives and distance from them. None of us would argue that the book didn't succeed masterfully at these levels. The issues with the book were twofold. About half the book had problems with the plot. Some of the choices Stuart made were just transparent meant to tug the heart strings, and the novel didn't need them to make us empathize. Really, did Leek have to be a great artist accepted into art school only to give it up because of his family? Would we have felt he was less disadvantaged if we didn't have that obvious plot twist? Really did Eugene have to be the one to throw Agnes off sobriety? Is that a bit pat as an AA story? Many of us weren't bothered by these decisions, but some of us felt that Stuart just wanted to beat us with sadness in every sentence, and that the story would have been better if he had just trusted the power of the rest with such easy gimmicks. The other issue is that the novel is very raw. Many NUBClubbers, particularly those who had been exposed to relatives with alcoholism, found the book so real as to be almost unreadable. We did a second vote to see how many people thought the novel was very fun and how many liked reading it, and that was very telling about how few of us would recommend the novel to anyone given how emotionally hard it was. Still, we ended on going back to the scenes, highlighting the moment when Shuggie is dancing for Agnes and is seen by the other children, who will mock him for being gay. Agnes encourages to keep dancing anyway, and we noted how the novel also ends with Shuggie dancing, getting a moment of joy in an impoverished and painful life. The power of that image is what Stuart absolutely nails throughout the novel, and as hard as it is to absorb, Shuggie Bain is a deserving Man Booker winner, and an incredibly potent depiction of pain, weakness, and the ways we find joy and perserverance within them.