57 pages • 1 hour read
Douglas StuartShuggie Bain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “1992: The South Side”
Chapter 1 Summary
Shuggie Bain has worked at Kilfeather’s Department Store at the deli counter for over a year. He never intended to stay this long. Shuggie loves hair and vows that he will attend a hairdressing school in town. He collects some damaged cans of fish, pays for them, and goes to the staff room, where the other employees—women older than him—spend their breaks gossiping. The women previously tried sexual advances on Shuggie while they were drunk at the bingo hall. When he did not reciprocate, they decided “Something about the boy was not right, and this was at least something they could pity” (6).
Shuggie sits up in the morning, cautiously listening to one of the other boarders use the restroom. Though Mrs. Bakhsh’s parsimonious boarding house is run down, Shuggie keeps his room meticulously tidy and decorated with small porcelain figures. He thinks of how his mother would not approve of the state of the place. His Pakistani landlords live in a lavish flat across the way, drawing envy from their tenants, who slide their rent under the door before spending the rest of their pay on alcohol. Most of the other men in the boarding house leave Shuggie alone, except for Mr. Darling, who seems to have taken a sexual interest in him.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Analysis
Set after the main events of the novel, Chapter 1 introduces many of recurring themes that will develop in the central plot. Shuggie, at age 16, is in a precarious situation. His school attendance is described as spotty at best, and he flies under the radar of officials, living in a property of a landlord who does not care about his age as long as he pays rent, and a boss who is satisfied to pay him less than an adult’s wages. Shuggie maintains his miserable living situation with the pride he learned from his mother, whose absence this chapter foreshadows.
Shuggie’s sexuality is consistently called into question by others throughout the novel; he is taken advantage of because of it, and, consequently, is unable to be open with himself. The conservative society he lives in imprints on him its distrust of homosexuality, and Shuggie tries for most of his life to fit in like a heterosexual boy. However, examining himself in the mirror, he struggles “to find something masculine in himself,” and decides his appearance “wasn’t right. It wasn’t how real boys were built to be” (11). He uses the book of football stats that Eugene, his mother’s one-time boyfriend, gave him as a sort of talisman to try to “correct” his non-heteronormative behavior and inclinations. Sexuality and masculinity will be a prominent theme throughout the novel, as well as alcohol abuse, which Shuggie notices in his fellow tenants.
