‘Everything About This Boy Was About His Mother’
For the poor, undereducated, underemployed characters of Douglas Stuart’s novels, late-20th-century Glasgow is a bleak world that is getting bleaker all the time. Each of his two novels thus far focuses on the dynamics of a single family living in a Glasgow devastated by the privatization schemes that collapsed Scottish industry under Margaret Thatcher. Absent fathers, plentiful drink, and no work produce a fictional world that is devoid of opportunity or advancement but full of carefully considered, minute, and dismal detail.
and , Stuart’s most recent novel, offer stories with similar trajectories. In both, mothers with alcohol addiction—after disappointments, money woes, romantic failures, and violence—retreat to the bottle and turn to their children for comfort, demanding affection and care. In both cases, as the families’ older children age, they begin to see their mother’s periodic entreaties for what they are:
