Stuart, like many novelists working in the mode of melodrama, favors plots that depend on family trauma (the only good mother is a dead one all troubled adults come from a broken home). Why do Shuggie and Mungo give it to them? Stuart seems to suggest that some of the boys’ common characteristics-they are both the youngest child of three they are both boys they are both gay-have something to do with it. Agnes and Maureen don’t love their children unreservedly, though they expect unreserved love from them. Curled around their mothers’ drunken forms, they are small, human hymns to the false rhetoric of some types of maternal love. But Shuggie and Mungo are different from their elder siblings when their mothers reach out to them in intoxicated longing, they reach back. In both cases, as the families’ older children age, they begin to see their mother’s periodic entreaties for what they are: lies meant to paper over both their neglect and their own losses. In both, mothers with alcohol addiction-after disappointments, money woes, romantic failures, and violence-retreat to the bottle and turn to their children for comfort, demanding affection and care. Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, Stuart’s most recent novel, offer stories with similar trajectories.

Absent fathers, plentiful drink, and no work produce a fictional world that is devoid of opportunity or advancement but full of carefully considered, minute, and dismal detail. Each of his two novels thus far focuses on the dynamics of a single family living in a Glasgow devastated by the privatization schemes that collapsed Scottish industry under Margaret Thatcher. For the poor, undereducated, underemployed characters of Douglas Stuart’s novels, late-20th-century Glasgow is a bleak world that is getting bleaker all the time.

Douglas stuart young mungo