Book Club - Max Porter’s Shy

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Max Porter is the critically acclaimed author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny.

The adults in Shy’s life might describe him as troubled, erratic, violent even. Shy himself doesn’t exactly know why these things keep happening but it’s ended him up in Last Chance, a home for wayward kids, itself on its last legs as developers converge on the property threatening its future.

What does Shy care?! He’s pushed away his mum and his foster dad and now in this haunted old pile he figures he’s not worth much more than a backpack full of stones and a walk to the local pond.

The events of Shy cover a mere few hours of a climactic night in Shy’s life, and yet as he sets out through the window of Last Chance and into the surrounding countryside we are taken on an expansive trip into the confusing and often chaotic world that has brought Shy up to this juncture.

I called Shy’s life chaotic there and it is with style and compassion that Porter brings this chaos onto the page. Both the prose and the typeset veer wildly across the sections evoking thoughts and snatches of conversation. Shy’s confusion and spiraling into the trap of his half realized adolescent life are vividly brought to life even as Shy plods towards a seeming conclusion.

I found the novel both confronting and comforting. Shy is troubled but the novel doesn’t seek to wrap his pain up into a neat bow. The possibility of transformation is elusive and Shy’s fate is a seemingly forgone conclusion; he’s writing himself off as surely as others have written him off.

Shy as ‘angry young man’ let’s you stay angry yourself at the senselessness of angst ridden masculinity whilst also revealing the pathos at its empty core.

This is a slim volume and if you let it, a quick read but the sense that it is reaching for something longer, more tangible is inescapable as you struggle to make sense of the life on the page.