At a home match day in East Anglia, the 20-year old Scot midfielder Billy Gilmour was subject to a homophobic chant. “Chelsea rent boy,” the away Liverpool fans sang. “You’re just a Chelsea rent boy!” Gilmour, on loan from Chelsea FC, of the eponymous West London neighborhood, found himself tee’d up for the much-derided song that recalled a time when the neighborhood was less posh. He didn’t have a great game, nor is he having a fun season on the coast, but the chant struck me at the time as an apt distillation of common narratives of homophobia.
Here is Gilmour, the young, bright talent from the tiny Scottish town of Irvine brought down south to the urban center London, given a chance at success, and up against him are the old, brutish Scouser men (they’re always men) who spit vitriol at the poor Scottish twink. A tale of triumph is set: Gilmour will overcome his homophobic interlocutors and the brutes will suffer in turn either by punishment or their failure to reach the heights of our hero. Surely, in the common narrative, the subject of a homophobic attack feels fear, but where does the anger of the attackers come from? The scholar Michael Kimmel has suggested homophobia is the “central organizing principle” of manhood and thus homophobia, rather than tremors at the sight of sodomy, morphs to a general fear of men by men. This formulation seems to be a bit too clean, perhaps revelatory for culture warriors, but a bit light when considering the movement of history. Homophobia doesn’t strike me as such a static notion as Kimmel perhaps suggests. Nevertheless, the Scottish-American novelist Douglas Stuart uses this fear of other men as his thematic organizing principle in his latest, Young Mungo.
The novel follows 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton as he navigates the treacherous loch waters of becoming a man. His father’s long dead; his mother, Mo-Maw, is a drunk while his sister, Jodie, does her best to fill the role despite being only two years Mungo’s senior. Hamish Hamilton, the oldest brother, is a Protestant gang leader who terrorizes the council estate and other Glaswegian neighborhoods.
The question at stake for the Hamilton family, and thus the novel, is Mungo’s future—what kind of man will he be? A setup for a bildungsroman, we follow Mungo’s attempts in early ‘90s Glasgow to develop his own sense of masculinity. Mo-Maw and his two older siblings all vie for control over his manhood. Meanwhile, he begins to fall in love with a Catholic named James Jamieson, who cares for pigeons in the council estate. Mungo navigates the various desires of those around him, while he learns that what he really wants is to escape everyone but sweet, blonde James.
Young Mungo develops similar concerns as Stuart’s debut novel, the Booker Prize winning, Shuggie Bain. His first novel luxuriated in the dourness of Glasgow’s working-class with a sing-songy brogue that quickly became a small joy in an otherwise depressive text. Young Mungo continues the promise of Stuart’s authorial talents to the extent that entire sections feel like lost notes for the first novel. The anthropologist’s preachy shock and awe of Shuggie Bain has faded, and what emerges is a straight forward tale of becoming a gay man in working-class Glasgow.
If this narrative conceit sounds a little pedestrian for a nearly 400-page novel, well it is. For large sections of the book, we jump from “The May After” and “The January Before,” but in seemingly random alternations that dislodge the narrative focus of the text. “Before” and “After” locate the beating of Mungo by a Catholic gang as a central moment in the narrative, but the time jump doesn’t seem to have changed Mungo beyond some severe bruising. When the novel opens in “The May After” section, Mo-Maw sends Mungo off with her AA buddies, the looming criminals St Christopher (Sunday to Thursday, not saint) and Gallowgate, names that ring of characters in a sentimental 19th century novel. Mungo looks like a “waif dressed in hand-me-downs” when we meet him, battered and bruised from violence at the hands of what Gallowgate calls “dirty Feinian bastards.”
On his journey to Western Scotland, Mungo is sent to learn “masculine pursuits” like fishing and camping. He follows along with these men on multiple buses to some place, but they won’t tell him where exactly. He’s lost, emotionally and literally at the outset, and while Gallowgate and St Christopher speak in accented inflected sentences, Mungo’s uses less brogue. “Do ye like tae fish?” asks St Christopher. “I don’t know” Mungo responds. “I’ve never done it before.”
He is often an unsure, inexperienced lad. Being fifteen and recently beaten within an inch of his life, his speech, instead of an accent, possesses a haunted, weary tone. Mungo had “been working hard at seeing what people really meant” but, Jodie sees him as “gullible.” This makes Mungo read like a much younger boy. There is a moment that stretches credulity where Gallowgate makes a joke about puberty that Mungo conceptually doesn’t understand, and later where Mungo sits on Gallowgate’s shoulders that made me question how the boy could be fifteen or if Stuart was suggesting he had some mental deficiency other than naivety.
We learn early of Mungo’s nervous facial tick, “the crinkled nose, the blinking, the face that looked like he might sneeze.” For a character in a novel, this choice sounds like a small quirk to give him what can be called roundness. That’s possible, until other characters have their own “things.” Jodie Hamilton adds ha-haha to the end of her sentences when she is nervous, Hamish Hamilton forces his subordinates to call him “Ha-Ha,” the kids named their drunk mother’s alter-ego “Tattie Boggle,” and James coughs from asthma. These character devices have inconsistent application in the text, and rather than create depth of feeling from dramatic conceits, linguistic flourishes in thought patterns, or distinctive speech that differentiates and completes them as characters, Stuart opts to tack accessories onto the principle actors.
We later discover that Mungo is avoiding a diagnosis from a doctor of possible Tourette’s Syndrome, but the timing of this disclosure in the text is suspect. He remembers the disease when someone asks if he has it, but rather than a Proustian slippage into time and memory, Stuart presents us with a stoppage in dramatic action for a half-memory. In the narration, plot is often delayed to such an extent as to make Mungo’s weariness and the malaise of the other principle characters enervating rather than earned. Similarly, the actual source of Mungo’s wounds is revealed three hundred pages later to be from a Catholic vs. Protestant gang fight, rather than an ambush, which Hamish forced Mungo to attend to prove his manhood. Stuart provides a direct narrative arc when a more explicit disclosure of events earlier would gift the tale tension.
Plot stutters once more when we learn Jodie Hamish has an older male lover, revealed many pages later to be her teacher, a man already introduced in the text. It’s all so coy. The teasing elements of the narrative can’t begin to titillate when sentences like “the fat bus bumped along the serpentine road,” or redundant metaphors such as “the cold [water] made a castrato out of him; it made him want to sing” populate paragraphs.
In the more substantial “The January Before” sections, we unspool Mo-Maw’s alcoholism and the way she tortures young Mungo with her off and on love. Mo-Maw has a cloying, often romantic, relationship with her youngest son and reads in an incredibly similar register to Agnes, the mother in Shuggie Bain. Jodie fills in as a mother at times, though she similarly wishes Mungo would man-up. When she discovers she is pregnant from her older lover, she demands Mungo punch her stomach to kill the baby. The boy can’t muster the strength, and she yells at her brother to “be a man for once,” a thing she wishes twice in the novel. Abortion was legal under U.K. law when the novel takes place, and Jodie eventually receives the care she wants, but Mungo feels weak and useless.
Hamish tries to stand in as a father for Mungo, though his violence and gang-banging make Mungo want to turn out differently from him. His brother knows he has failed Mungo’s masculine training so he resorts to more extreme methods when he takes Mungo along to blow up someone’s car, and then later forces him into the gang fight that ultimately injures him. Hamish fears that Mungo will turn out gay if he doesn’t intervene. The narrator suggests “there was nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman.” Masculinity in the novel fears this transgression, moving through the world in a way beyond a settled code. Masculinity fears the possibilities of what other men could do to or even with each other.
In opposition is femininity, and what it means to be a woman hangs in the balance within the novel and for Mungo. Early in the novel, the women of the estate are described as “big lazy doos with their eyes half-closed and their heads swallowed by neck feathers.” Young women that James and Mungo attempt to seduce bob and are beady-eyed like “the cold pigeons that waited for the pensioners who came with the end of a loaf.” Late in the novel, Mungo feels like a “doo” rhetorically positioning him as possessing feminine qualities. Early in the novel, the men of Hamish’s gang remind Mungo of bees working in the hive. The birds and the bees. Do you get it?
Mo-Maw exists late in the novel to dispense feminine wisdom for Jodie. With all her smarts and university future, the narrative wants us to see Jodie resist stooping to Mo-Maws level, but she’s not the central concern, Mungo is. Jodie tends to be the harshest on their mother “in a way that only girls were allowed to be.” Mo-Maw warns Jodie that “wummin to wummin, ye might not know how men are yet” when asked why she hadn’t told her new boyfriend about the children. It’s “too early” for her to be “messy, to be a bother.” But, the cruelty of women to other women falls emotionally flat because Stuart won’t commit and turn the screw on his thematic and dramatic design. We rarely see Jodie interact with anyone outside the Hamilton clan, and Mo-Maw’s exploits with other women and men come in narration not action, a complaint that might ring a bit too much like “show-don’t-tell.” The often lofty and contested ideas of masculinity and femininity contained in the novel deserve their due; these things matter. The novel lacks the ability to transform these ideas into artistic and intellectual substance.
The simple masculine-feminine opposition presented comes bisected by the Catholic homosexual James. He looks like a boy or man depending on how “he turned or how the light caught him” but doesn’t hold himself with “callous posturing” or “self-protective swagger.” The chapters where James and Mungo begin their courtship are the most breezy of the novel. I found myself overjoyed to see quiet Mungo express himself, joke around, and become vulnerable. I wished the novel spent more time there. It was a “lovely place for two boys to be: honest, exciting, immature.”
But that enjoyment curdled as Stuart via Mungo deployed a metaphor where homosexuality is a deviant’s journey. Mungo sees a “dark road” and James is on it. He knows he shouldn’t follow James down it, but James continues to “walk down a path ahead of him” while Mungo trails behind. Rather than sloppy, this sounds tired, disjointed and out of time from the rest of the novel. This disturbance frustrated me because it doesn’t destabilize a straight-forward reading of the novel but confirms it. As a metaphor, it recalled the structural simplicity of Dickens. James Jamieson, blonde and Catholic, sits quite simply in opposition with dark-haired Mungo, with his name that recalls a saint of the Scottish Church. Stuart wields his authorial power to complicate his story in a despotic fashion, like a king directing his subjects: Mungo will discover his sexuality with first a kiss that has “secret warmth;” Jodie will be accepted into college despite her pregnancy; James will be able to escape his father’s home.
It does seem bizarre, at least to me, that compared to Young Mungo, fiction written before and in the time this novel takes place is far more casual about the social problem of homosexuality. For example, Hollinghurst’s characters, usually shielded by inherited wealth or status, find contrast in the street urchins those protagonists pick up, but they aren’t wretches of the earth and deviants outcast from the city walls like the way Stuart imagines. The spare autofiction of James Robert Baker or Guillhaume Dustan identifies homophobia in society, but the consequences of those feelings occur in action (murder in Baker’s case, sex-mania in Dustan’s) rather than lament or weepy metaphor. Even the quaint family dramas of David Leavitt counter the unsettling dynamics of gay sons with some levity.
As others have argued (Lorentzen here, McAdory here), our fiction has taken a sincere turn that may account for this disjointed-ness. The novel then becomes a type of “morality fiction,” as imagined separate from morality in fiction. The traumas inflicted on protagonists in morality fiction offer them relatability to the reader and authority for a story. In the case of social novels like Stuart writes, there is a risk that such moralizing collapses the socio and historical record; and thus, the stakes are not only literary, where bland, lipidic prose tells tales of grey operatic drama, but social. The 1950s of White and Vidal were extremely different from the 1990s of Stuart for gay people, yet one could read Jim Willard in The City and The Pillar next to Mungo Hamilton and believe nothing has changed or will change for gay people. Adam Mars-Jones calls this issue a “perceptual slippage” where “the lugubrious furniture of fraught gay identity” namely family or sexual trauma exist in abundance, despite the reality that gay life has improved in the Anglosphere. Young Mungo is not without opportunities to offer something else, but in one instance, neither the narrator, James, nor Mungo after listening to “Panic” by the Smiths comment on Morrissey’s form of masculinity and thus sexuality. One of the gay-baiting icons of the era enters and exits the narrative without so much as a simile.
The sentimental elements of Stuart leads then to a social commentary that simplifies the narrative rather than complicates it. When a neighbor complains about Margaret Thatcher’s strike breaking of the coal miners, Jodie believes the neighbor is blaming women for the changes to the economy. A battle of material, and an ideological war between Scottish trade unions and the English-dominated government comes distilled into a battle of the sexes. Thatcher was making a “tough decision,” rather than protecting the wealth of the ruling class. The neighbor, it turns out, beats his wife, so he does hate women. The other person to complain about Thatcher is the teacher who impregnates Jodie, whose defense of Thatcher rings like a Twitter slogan: “stop blaming women.”
Giving Jodie a conservative feminist bend of course offers some complexity to her character, yet Stuart, reveals his hand elsewhere. An outcast neighbor refers to the male gangs that populate the council estate as “poor beasts,” and a page later moralizes about his dog that even when beasts have no chance at success, they continue to expect a different outcome. Later in the novel, Mungo begins listing negative things to himself that others have called him, internalizing their insults. The list begins “idiot, weakling, liar” but speeds up to “poofter, coward.” These grow in their severity, being an idiot is fine but he can’t even be a strong moron, while poofter and coward are the worst insults Hamish offers. Yet, the crescendo rises once more. James calls Mungo a bigot after he participates in the Catholic vs. Protestant gang fight. James won’t even look at Mungo anymore. The greatest crime the novel sincerely suggests is a violation of liberal values of tolerance, which while a virtue, within this novel, reads as facile and nauseatingly self-aware of the middlebrow literary audience. The state of the Glaswegian working-class is simply the way things are, there is no hope, no future, but the novel wants this moment of James’s rejection of Mungo for lacking tolerance to be a deeply felt moment. Their love, however strong, can’t abide bigotry. It is all so clean and straight-forward, the sentimentality and gravity of feeling offered falls completely flat because of Stuart’s inability to imagine anything worse for Mungo to do than be intolerant. The novel would be quaint did it not desire so cloyingly to be transcendent.
Throughout other parts of the novel, Mungo is subjected to multiple rapes before ultimately setting him free to meet James at the bus stop to run away together. The story offers these traumatic events only as gothic color on the saccharine ending. Mungo deserves his finale because he suffered so much, not because the author wanted to tell a sensual tale of love and loss. Rather than looking upon the plight of the working-class Glaswegians in his novels and seeing the horror of their condition, he offers liberal platitudes, and a gendered understanding of social conflict in hollow prose that revels in the condition of contemporary life in the Anglosphere rather than offer the reader art. The prose lacks sensuality and style which creates little or no enjoyment, while far from being a minimalist puzzle. What populates the novel is a narrative conceit meant to confirm a middlebrow understanding of the world and elide the complexity of the human condition into a simple, ascetic universe. The whole affair is all quite simple, which rather than being delightful and brisk like a beach-read, I asked myself why the novel existed for anyone but the author.