Category: Dysfunctional Families

Dysfunctional Families, Fiction, LGBT, literary fiction

Book Review – Whistler by Ann Patchett

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“There is so much randomness to youth. The person assigned to share your room becomes your friend, the girl you pass on your way out the door becomes your wife, and from these random encounters our entire lives are built”

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little over a year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie since the divorce and the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, the look back over the choices they made and the choices that were made for them. This is a story about memory and the consequential moments that define our lives and the endless loss that in time comes for us all.

If you do not like character driven books, this one is most definitely not for you. I’ve always said that I prefer Patchett’s nonfiction to her fiction but there is something about Whistler that brings that version of her writing over to fiction. This story has extremely normal characters who have lived normal lives and have normal hangups with their childhood. I think I’m so used to expecting bombastic things and revelations to happen when someone from the past comes back into fictional lives that I held my breath waiting for Eddie to do or say something inappropriate and it just doesn’t happen. I think Patchett manages to bring a little bit of kindness into literary fiction and still makes it pleasurable to read. Where not everything wrong thing your parents did in your childhood is seen as having completely ruined your life, where parents are treated like human beings and given a little grace to be that.

We witness Daphne’s relationship with her sister, Leda, and the complicated relationship they have with their mother and the siblings that came from their mother’s next and final marriage. Her relationship with her biological father who was flawed in many ways but tried to make up for it in ways he knew how to. I really enjoyed how nobody in this book was a saint or the devil. They were all trying to do the best for their happiness and the best for the children and the community they had around. We find out from the start that Daphne doesn’t fly but the reason isn’t revealed until much later, but her decision is sometimes a source of tension in her marriage to Jonathan.

At the heart of this book is the longing for family – the ones we are born into, the ones we inherit and the ones we choose. It explores the quiet spaces between a life well lived or a life just lived – the love, regret, forgiveness and the people we end up hurting and the justifications we give to that hurting. The story of Eddie’s relationship with his best friend is just heartbreaking for all involved but especially the best friend’s wife who didn’t have a say in the deceit.

This is a deeply compassionate novel and Patchett manages to do this in under 300 pages. I quite enjoyed this quiet book. Have you read this one? Did you enjoy it? I gave this 4 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Dysfunctional Families, Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

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“She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn’t do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.”

Shuggie Bain tells the story of a family in 1980s Glasglow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. This story delves into Shuggie’s family and their history. There is Agnes Bain who is Shuggie’s mother and his entire world but is a burden for him and his siblings, his father, who he is named after, is a philandering taxi driver who has left his mother completely broken, his siblings who fight to get away from the burden that is their parents and their grandparents who have had to pick up the pieces for so long. This is a story about addiction, sexuality and love.

I picked up this book because I’m waiting for my library to release Stuart’s John of John to me which has just been long listed for the Booker prize and was Oprah’s book club pick for May. I decided to pick up Shuggie Bain because everyone referred to him as the author of Shuggie Bain and I’d never even heard about this book before. This book won the Booker Prize in 2020. Anyway, this book should not have been titled Shuggie Bain because it was not about him at all. This was about the entire Bain family and more prominently about their mother, Agnes Bain. It is about how Agnes’ choices and her life might have shaped her children’s life. Shuggie isn’t even 16 when the story ends so we don’t even see how her choices shaped his life at all. I couldn’t actually figure out who Shuggie was on the page because the author spent the entire time telling us how the kids perceived him and not how he actually was. His entire character was defined by his sexuality or what everyone around him saw as him being different because Shuggie never actually came out as gay, but everyone agreed he didn’t behave or walk like a “real” boy.

Agnes Bain was someone who the author did not manage to make sympathetic to me. I found everything about her to be slightly pathetic, and I felt bad that I just wanted her to be off the page so I could get to the part where Shuggie grows up. Shuggie never grows up and Agnes dominates the entire book so essentially, I did not get what I wanted at all or what the title of the book promised me. Agnes makes choices without ONCE putting her kids first. Not once. Every single choice she makes in this book was self-serving and in pursuit of male companionship. She leaves a stable marriage with two kids after having an affair with a taxi driver, she then succumbs to addiction to dull the pain from the treatment she gets from said man in her second marriage, she then uproots her kids from their grandparents’ house to a house she’s never seen before still in pursuit of this man and when said man finally leaves her and she manages to achieve sobriety she goes back to the drink because of another man. Agnes was too male centered for me to be sympathetic to her story.

Shuggie is sexually molested by multiple people in this book but at no point do we know what Shuggie actually feels about these incidents. We move right past them to being told how many cigarettes and bottles of alcohol Agnes was having while her child was being molested. We get multiple incidents of people molesting him and a scene where he thinks it’s so normal that he offers himself as payment to a taxi driver when his mother kicks him out of the house without any money, but we never even see Shuggie struggle with this. He moves right past it to continue being a caretaker for his mum and trying to keep her alive without any thought to his well-being.

Agnes’ other two kids Catherine and Leek. Catherine has the right idea to get out as soon as she could. She marries her stepfather’s cousin and skips out of Scotland straight to apartheid South Africa to supervise the blacks. Apart from the moving to South Africa to help with all the oppressing, I actually thought she had the best idea to leave Agnes. She knew from the start that she wasn’t going to stay and save her mother, and she took the first flight out of the dysfunction while Leek and Shuggie wallowed in it. When Leek finally gets out, he has only one sentence of advice for Shuggie – leave as soon as you can, but Shuggie loved their mother too much and did not know any other type of life to escape of his own free will.

Anyway, I know I’m in the minority, but I found this book very one note, but this is a favorite in the literary community so still give it a go. I gave this 3 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy