Shy (Faber & Faber) by Max Porter
Creeping down a corridor at night, spliff safely stowed, Walkman in hand, avoiding the squeaky floorboards, a deeply troubled 16-year-old boy is running away. There is a lot to run away from. The title character of the novel Shy is making a chaotic escape from Last Chance – a countryside boarding house for “very disturbed young men”. As he wanders into the mid-1990s night air, a tangle of voices, memories and emotions tear through him.
In the course of the novel, we see Shy’s ability to unleash violence, his sexual misadventures, the knife-edge teeter into manic episodes, the precise pressure-cooker blend of frustration and turmoil known only to his see-sawing mind – they are all visited upon him as he stumbles and remembers and ponders. This short book can be read as the third of a trilogy by Max Porter that explores childhood and the yawning chasms of potential horror that love and parenthood can expose us to when catastrophe occurs.
His first novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, relates the harrowing death of a young mother and the impact on her partner and two sons. The second, Lanny, explores the impact on parents, friends and the wider community when a young child goes missing. In Shy, the all-consuming nightmare of a young person morphing from an apparently happy child into an unpredictable and troubled teenager deftly brings home not just the desperate rollercoaster that the individual may be on, but also the enormity of what families in this not-uncommon scenario can be grappling with.
In one heartbreaking flashback to the not-too-distant past, Shy recalls his mother and stepfather bribing him with a packet of cigarettes to join them watching the camcorder videos they made of his childhood – a happy boy playing and singing in the summer sunshine. Of course, the tactic cannot bring back what has been swept away. Back in the present we learn that Last Chance is to be closed and turned into luxury flats.
Is Shy escaping the confines of the grounds, or is he dumping his home before it dumps him? The brute heartlessness of capitalism and governments’ obeisance to the market loom from every shadow in this book. But despite the dark subject matter, there is endless playfulness and bursts of joy – both an insight into Shy’s frothing, giddy mind and of course, Porter’s own form-busting creative flair.
A book concerning the teenage nihilism of a white male protagonist brought up in a loving family could easily be dismissed as an exploration of “first world problems”, but Shy’s extreme behaviour and profound mental health issues put him beyond this unhelpful label and invite a mature discussion about the chronic malaise masculinity finds itself in today. Shy and his contemporaries at Last Chance may be steeped in Lynx Africa and spend their days trading puerile sexual insults – but they are also a perfect reminder of how fundamentally compromised as individuals, and as a society, we have been by generations of male omerta around basic emotional articulation, let alone mental health issues.
Porter’s discipline-blurring mixture of broken and mashed-up prose, poetry and page layout experimentation was used to good effect in his previous books – particularly in his dramatic fictional account of the last moments of the artist Francis Bacon’s life. It seems even more suited to describing the bipolar oscillations, drug-induced pace changes and snapping viewpoints of a teenage mind on the cusp of violence or psychosis. The narrative builds in intensity like a panic attack – new dimensions of unexpected awfulness sloshing into an already overflowing vessel.
Porter gives articulation to the inarticulate, wires us into the fluctuating private meditations of a young man in the grip of a mental health crisis in prose which flowers into a stunning display of empathic prowess. Shy shows us how the ripples of sickness on the surface of civilisation not only spread out in damaging concentric circles, but can also reveal the wild undercurrents beneath – those ancient churning forces still warping the world we live in.
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
