‘Young Mungo’ Explores Love and Violence in Emotional Technicolor

YOUNG MUNGO
By Douglas Stuart
390 pages. Grove Press. $27.

A critic might generate a complete e book assessment just by reproducing her marginalia. It might be boring to learn however correct, like an EKG printout. If the e book in query have been “Younger Mungo,” by Douglas Stuart, it would start with observations like “Attractive writing!” and “Wow,” earlier than graduating to expletives and exclamation marks and wobbly underlines and query marks. Household-friendly adjectives don’t at all times describe the yanking of sure coronary heart strings on this beautiful however often overworked novel.

“Younger Mungo” is a cousin to Stuart’s debut, “Shuggie Bain,” which was awarded the Booker Prize in 2020 and was a finalist for the Nationwide E-book Award. As with that novel, this one tells the story of a boy and his alcoholic mom in working-class Glasgow. The novels share a brutality and a squirmy, claustrophobic evocation of household life. And so they provide a world of beautiful element: If a fragrance creator wished to bottle the olfactory panorama of post-Thatcher-era Glasgow, all the mandatory components might be present in Stuart’s descriptions of sausage grease, fruity fortified wine, pigeon droppings and store-bought hair bleach.

Mungo is 15 years outdated and the youngest of three youngsters. His mom, Maureen, often known as Mo-Maw, is a boozy wreck given to frequent disappearances. This isn’t the type of girl who, when she vanishes, is presumed to be on an “Eat, Pray, Love”-style voyage of self-discovery. That is the type of girl whose youngsters instantly concern her to be not solely lifeless however gruesomely and particularly lifeless: gutted with a steak knife and dumped bare in a river.

We first encounter Mungo as he’s taken from his home by two unusual males for a weekend of tenting and fishing. The total, darkish function of the journey is unclear, and the truth that it has been sanctioned by Maureen — who waves her son away with pink-painted fingernails from the window of the household’s tenement flat — is ominous.

The grisly occasions of that journey are interspersed with chapters about James, an older boy from the neighborhood whom Mungo meets on an empty lot beside a motorway, the place the elder has constructed a “doocot” construction for protecting pigeons. James’s contact, not like that of different native boys, doesn’t trigger Mungo to flinch in protection. The 2 fall in love, and the way might they not? James is resourceful and appears “like an oil portray”; Mungo is undefended and sleek, with pores and skin “so creamy that you simply needed to take a spoon to him.” With James, Mungo discovers a love not rooted in subjugation.

However homophobia is a noxious fog. Each boys are instructed, amply and colorfully, to man up. The phrases of manhood on this biome are to own an outrageously excessive ache threshold and the capability to inflict torture. A boy is perhaps thought of a person if, for instance, he can fall off a bit of building gear at an amazing top, shatter his arm, urinate on himself from the ache and but keep away from wailing like a child. He could also be a person if he is ready to smash a brick over a cop’s head, stab an evening watchman, slash faces and shatter tooth.

The query, then, is whether or not love can survive this unimaginably hostile setting. Simply while you suppose the soil is just too acidic for these tender sprouts to flourish, Mungo and James discover new reserves of sturdiness. Being delicate to the world means being pummeled by it, nevertheless it additionally permits one to adapt.

When Stuart errs, it’s on the aspect of extra. Many passages might need profited from being left as subtext. In these, it’s as if Stuart has allowed the CliffsNotes model of “Younger Mungo” to barge instantly into the novel. We perceive how Mungo feels when somebody undermines his humanity with a snarky remark; we don’t want the exposition of: “Right here was yet one more individual telling him what he wanted, how he ought to act, the individual he needs to be. One other one who didn’t suppose he was sufficient simply as he was.”

This occurs with rising frequency, and it presents a riddle: When an writer repeatedly insists on telling what he has already proven, is it as a result of he doesn’t belief the reader’s attentiveness or as a result of he questions his personal effectiveness? Is it condescension or self-doubt?

Right here, as he did in “Shuggie Bain,” Stuart mixes the self-aware floridity and emotional Technicolor of a Douglas Sirk melodrama with the ambient violence of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. As Mungo undergoes one atrocity after the following — beatings, sexual assault, abuse and exploitation of each kind — the specificity of every episode dangers blurring into an aesthetic of generalized wretchedness.

Some readers will really feel themselves thrust into the position of a distress vacationer. Others will reply the best way the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder responded to Sirk’s movies, dazzled into inarticulate reverence. “An incredible, loopy film about life and about demise,” is how Fassbinder described Sirk’s “Imitation of Life.”

There may be loopy greatness in “Younger Mungo,” together with corny lapses and moments with the expository flatness of a TV voice-over. Nonetheless, faulting a novel of this register for intemperance seems like faulting an opera for being “too loud.” The amount is a part of the purpose. Typically you wince. Typically you exult.