Young Mungo (5*)

Let me begin with envious regard for Douglas Stuart's superb writing.  In this early description of a Protestant gang's thieving assault on a construction site, he lyrically sets the stage for the brutal cross-cultural rumble--not unlike the climactic one in West Side Story--that sickens the reader with its dream-crushing violence.

They ran this obstacle course of follow-my-leader and climbed higher and higher. They found new ways to make it more dangerous. They took it in turns to climb the angled neck of the brontosaurus excavators, they crept upwards to the bucket and then they leapt, gliding through the air to the roof of a backhoe. If they missed, then it was a 20-foot plummet to the ground. But they flew across the night sky like fearless angels, their tracksuits flapping behind them like flightless wings.

Stuart is particularly adept with unexpected allusion:

Mungo had been delighted to catch a glimpse inside the boozer and spy a cluster of stout women dancing together, gyrating across the floor like washing machines that had juddered loose from their brackets.

While his references to pop culture are few, they often work double-time, allowing a kind man with a pair of dogs who picks up a traumatized hitchhiker to establish his unthreatening heterosexuality.

“This is Crystal and that one is Alexis. Never let your wife name your pets.”

Stuart's dissection of porn models contrasts hilariously with the bodies (and innocence) of Mungo, a Protestant named for Glasgow's patron saint, and James, the slightly older Catholic boy who keeps homing pigeons:

The magazine was full of bloated Americans. Men with swollen muscles and lines of amber tans that showed the ghost of their missing swimming trunks.  They didn’t have the long, thin limbs of him or James, the soft downy trails of hair, or the white skin that flushed when you touched it, that turned blue or pink depending on temperature, on emotion. Everything about these Americans was artificially plump; they were shaved and plucked, lying on their backs, legs in the air, more like Christmas turkeys than men. There was a painful rictus on their faces, glazed eyes, false winces of pleasure.  One man was grinning at the camera while he choked his floppy cock, strangling it like it was an empty tube of toothpaste.

Like Stuart's Booker Prize-winning Snuggie Bain, the novel depicts a lower-class Glaswegian family barely supported--emotionally or financially--by a single alcoholic mother.  While a gay mama's boy narrates both novels, Young Mungo is more engaging in many respects.  The dialect isn't quite as pervasive, and it tells a tender story of love flowering between two teenage boys, something we've rarely seen in serious literature.  At the same time, Stuart veers into what I call A Little Life territory, or misery porn.  Is life in the East End really this sadistic?  It's a miracle that anyone gets out alive.  The birds certainly don't.