JOHN OF JOHN, by Douglas Stuart
Three things almost drove me away from Douglas Stuart’s moving, suspenseful, completely-worth-your-time new novel even before I got to the first page. For those of you who share my tendency to make decisions about what to read quickly and idiosyncratically, I will share them here as a lesson in the value of ignoring those instincts.
First, there’s that quasi-palindromic title, which seems destined to be misremembered (John IS John? John AND John?) and, in any case, felt somehow uninviting, like a door locked on both sides. Second, the genre: “John of John” is a Leaving the City and Going Back Home to Face Things novel, a category so well worn, from Thomas Wolfe to the Hallmark Channel, that I didn’t feel much incentive to revisit it. And third, my alarm bells sounded at a phrase in the jacket copy: “As lambing season turns to shearing season. …” Oh, no, I thought. This is going to be one of those novels in which the travails of stoic, simple people of the soil are trudgingly described in prose that smells of damp wool and earnestness.
Be assured that the latest work from Stuart, whose debut, “Shuggie Bain,” won the 2020 Booker Prize, is the furthest thing from damp. “John of John” is a stick of dynamite waiting to go off in your hand, the steadily intensifying story of a fractured trio — grandmother, father and son — who are held together, barely, by their waning ability not to say the words to one another that will blow them apart. So strained is the household, which still feels defined by the end of the marriage that shattered it years ago, that barely a kind word is spoken, either in English, the language that they all share, or Scottish Gaelic, which two of them use either to shield or to shut out the third.
When we meet 22-year-old Cal (short for John-Calum), he’s on the verge of giving up. Just months out of art school in Edinburgh, he has failed to thrive and has been summoned home by his ruggedly handsome, permanently angry father, John, a weaver, farmer and thunderingly severe Calvinist deacon who tends a flock of 26 faithful humans and probably about as many sheep. Cal is gay, and the time is the late 1990s, which means that he grew up “nourished by the horrors he saw on the evening news, all those biblical images of gaunt, sunken-eyed men, covered in sores and dying alone.” His father, who is worldly enough to read “Swann’s Way” and “To the Lighthouse” in a book group, doesn’t know. And the home they share, though it barely merits the label, is a small house on a croft (a rented farm — I learned some good words from this novel and hope one day to deploy “fank” and “chuntering”) on the rocky, jagged Isle of Harris, the sparsely populated northernmost island of the Hebrides. Rendered by Stuart in precise brushstrokes, it sounds like a rough equivalent of rural Maine if someone sawed off a small chunk and shoved it several dozen miles into the North Atlantic.
A few chapters in, you will want to wire Cal whatever money he needs to ditch his family and get on the first ferry back to the mainland, although a poignant, mortifying account of his attempt to find a hookup via newspaper personal ads (again, the late ’90s) doesn’t suggest that a utopia awaits him there. Still, at least Edinburgh has gay men; in Cal’s hometown, there is nothing for him but a father who is both emotionally and physically abusive, a grandmother who has her own issues, a catalog of old relationships in such disrepair that there’s no mending them, and a dead-end life he doesn’t deserve.
One of the biggest surprises in a novel full of them is that Stuart is not particularly interested in telling either a coming-home or a coming-of-age story, at least not the one you think you’re going to hear. Though he starts by hitting some familiar beats — “Thought you were too good for us,” one old friend snipes at the prodigal Cal — he uses that architecture to build something different, stranger and far more original. What Cal’s father doesn’t know about him is, it turns out, nothing compared to what Cal doesn’t know about his father. Without giving too much away, they have more in common than either suspects, including the deep affection of a third man, and their respective identities come to a head in an encounter that may make you shout “No! Don’t!” even as you race on.
Stuart is not just a very good writer but an immensely skilled storyteller who is more than up to the extraordinarily challenging task he sets himself — to build bridges between characters who are so cut off from one another and from themselves that they are, as Cal’s grandmother puts it, “islands within islands.” Notwithstanding the novel’s striking setting, he’s not given to rhapsodic fugues about the sky and the sea and the crags; he’s more interested in the seams and faults and chasms within people who have come to believe that they’re living past any expectations of pleasure. When John summons Cal home, it’s with the words, “You’ve had your fun.” Not a syllable is wasted. He doesn’t have to add “forever”; you know he means it.
He’s wrong, as it turns out, and one of the many pleasures of “John of John” — a title that eventually blossoms to reveal about five different meanings, all interesting — is that Stuart doesn’t let on until the very end whether he is writing toward hope or toward tragedy. Until he reveals the answer, he wants you to stay in the room with these difficult people, to try to puzzle them out, to watch them wage impossible struggles, and to wish them well. As for those lambs: They’re not adorable or beguiling. They’re flesh and mess and dirt and need, and like the people who tend them, they live in a tough and unforgiving world. But at least they’re not their own worst enemies.
JOHN OF JOHN | By Douglas Stuart | Grove | 403 pp. | $28
The post For 3 Generations on a Scottish Island, Secrets Can Only Stay Secret So Long appeared first on New York Times.
