Winter Loon and Shuggie Bain
Holy smokes: I read Shuggie Bain and Winter Loon basically concurrently and although that was accidental, I have never, ever experienced a more complementary pairing.
I’m sure you know Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning novel that explores alcoholism as well as generational poverty and abuse in Glasgow’s public housing districts. Winter Loon, Susan Bernhard’s debut novel, takes many of these themes over to frigid and bleak Minnesota. Both novels revolve around boys who are functionally fatherless, who must navigate childhood without meaningful guidance (although Wes Ballot, Winter Loon’s protagonist, is lucky enough to receive some tangential wisdom via another family), and who grapple with how to love their mothers. (That is, both in life and death: Wes Ballot’s mother dies after a breakaway opening scene where she drowns in a frozen lake in front of her son who tries to save her. [FYI, it’s not a spoiler; it’s on the back blurb!]) Shuggie’s mother happens to be “around,” but ugh – I guarantee you’ll hold your hand to your heart when you read some scenes because, well, she’s really not.
So many thoughtful questions to explore: How does one “escape” one’s situation? Why are some unable to move forward? How does a child untangle mixed emotions about his parents? Why do some get such a crap hand dealt to them? I’d argue that one of these protagonists gets to experience redemption and a resurrection of sorts and one remains more noticeably wounded. But what do we – readers – really know about how it all turns out? And must we always require redemption in our books? (I actually explored this idea via The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes for The Curator several years ago; you can read it here.)
As Bernhard writes: “How wrecked and broken we were, all of us, a clattering boneyard of broken souls.” That can be oh so true – and humanity would probably be better off if we would sit with that once in a while.
originally published on instagram