I just finished a novel that was heavy on heart-break and, thankfully, fleetingly hopeful. Why do I read books like this? Books that describe a world so removed and so much harsher than my own? Part of it is I am sporadically compulsive. Only rarely do I begin and then abandon a book. Years ago, when my book group chose The Trial of Socrates, I read part way through it and gave up. Three decades later, I still feel guilty.
A friend of mine always reads page 50 of any book she’s thinking of reading, and if it doesn’t hold her attention, she casts it aside. Such discipline. Me, I finish books – and too many middling movies – just in case there’s something I might miss. So, I just finished Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. I’d heard it reviewed on NPR, but I was probably half asleep, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was in for when I put it on reserve at the library. Now I know: A Protestant named for the patron saint of Glasgow (odd, that), Mungo lives on the brink of manhood. Questions about his identity, intellect and sexuality are as twitchy as his fuzz-covered cheeks. The plot leaps forward and backward in time – a challenge for linear me – from a hellish fishing trip with two “adult” strangers, whom his alcoholic mom entrusts with her most loving son, to brutish hand-to-hand combat between Protestant and Catholic youths who aren’t sure why they hate each other but can’t overcome their addiction to violence. Poverty, ignorance and pervasive ill will set the stage. Here is the opening paragraph: “As they neared the corner, Mungo halted and shrugged the man’s hand from his shoulder. It was such an assertive gesture that it took everyone by surprise. Turning back, Mungo squinted up at the tenement flat, and his eyes began to twitch with one of their nervous spasms. As his mother watched him through the ear-of-wheat pattern of the net curtains, she tried to convince herself that his twitch was a happy wink, a lovely Morse code that telegraphed everything would be okay. F. I. N .E. Her younger son was like that. He smiled when he didn’t want to. He would do anything just to make other people feel better.” As unsettling as Young Mungo was to read, the book surprised me with sweet, though quick to disappear and often tarnished moments of grace, along with startlingly detailed descriptions of deliberate harm to loved ones and virtual strangers. It made me think in ways that pages of beautiful prose often don’t – about the roots of violence, hatred, fear and suspicion that thrive in overwhelming want, and how the phrase “working class” really does define all of us who struggle to understand who we are and why we are where we are. In some ways, my life has little to do with Mungo’s, his shattered family, the threat of where he lives, and the love of his life, James. But in other, even irrational ways, I find myself wanting to pray for this imaginary character. Stuart breathed life into this young man, faced his torment, discovered his surprising resilience and somehow, shook me into finding a little of my own. Mungo was so worth the struggle, and so was the book about him.
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