Excellent writing in an unrelieved bleakness in the much-lauded novel Shuggie Bain

 About 100 pp (25%) into Douglas Stuart's much-lauded debut novel Suggie Bain, and will withhold final judgment till at or near the end but to this point I'd say there's much to praise in this novel but also some cautionary words for potential readers may be in order. This novel is depiction of a three-generation, deeply troubled family living in and around the dismal council housing in Glasgow and vicinity in, I think, the 1980s, the height or depth of Thatcherism, as the defunct coal mines with all the mystery and pollution that they bring to the landscape and populace but at least provided plenty of work for unskilled (and some skilled) laborers hover at the edges of the story. The central character (the novel begins w/ his at age about 20 and living in a rented room in Glasgow and apparently getting by through male prostitution), the eponymous Shuggie, cold and lonely and dismal as is just about everything else in the novel - then jumps back to S's childhood moving from place to place, the mother (Agnes) a severe alcoholic and the father (Shug, just to make the narrative that much more difficult) a philanderer who barely provides for the family welfare. Shuggie as a young child seems somewhat protected by his two older half-sibs and, to a lesser extent, by his maternal grandparents. The plot is thin, but that's OK - this is more a story of mood or setting than a conventional novel. The warning I would put forth is that I've seldom read such an unrelenting portrait of poverty and misery and addiction; there's not a glimpse of humor nor of hope. That said, it's still worth reading and Stuart's facility w/ language, dialect, and acute observation - not by any of the characters but by the omniscient author - balances out the miseries of the setting and astonishes w/ various insightful passages and moments; let's call it the exact counterpart to Proust - beautiful writing about people whom we really don't sympathize w/ or even want to know. Whether I stay with this novel or not will depend, I think, on whether there's a positive moment in the next 100 pages - or will it be just unrelenting sorrow, and who needs that right now?