Shy

March 20, 2023
Porter (Grief Is the Thing with Feathers) dispatches a slender burst of Joycean prose detailing the fragmented psyche of a troubled teenage boy in 1995 England. Expelled from two schools, Shy is poised between the mess he’s made of his past and his uncertain future. The reader meets him as he’s escaping from Last Chance, the institution to which he’s been consigned by his worried mother and archnemesis of a stepfather, with only his techno mixtape for comfort. What ensues is a frantic collage of memories, regrets, dreams, and an inner monologue that emerges piecemeal until Shy surfaces as a pure if disturbed soul caught in desperate circumstances. His lowlife friends have nearly abandoned him and his well-meaning teachers are not to be trusted. Shy may tell himself, “There’s more to life than drum n bass. There’s more to life than getting wasted,” but it will take a drugged-out encounter with his personal demons before he can begin to reckon with what shape that life may take. There’s an arresting quality to the narrative’s frantic breaths of prose poetry and brief, fractured form. As an experiment in character seen from the inside out, it stands as a singular shoutout to lost boys everywhere.

April 1, 2023
A gloomy but memorable tale by British novelist Porter, who likes his literature dark. Porter's previous novels have addressed death, metamorphosis, and monstrous figures out of British folklore who walk the mews and have permanent addresses. Here, his protagonist is younger and, though he comes over as tough, quite vulnerable. Midway into his teens, Shy has already been expelled from school, arrested, thrown out of his home. "He's sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad's finger, but it's been a while since he's crept" (that is, burgled). Now, in the doldrums of the mid-1990s, Shy finds himself in a program meaningfully called Last Chance, populated by fellow screw-ups and well-intentioned adults such as "Nice Andy the Bearded History Teacher" who want only to help Shy even as the lad finds ways to offend against both the law and polite discourse (as when he calls a visiting dignitary the C-word, asking whether being such is "part of the training for, like, becoming an MP"). This brief and sometimes oddly lyrical novel is spoken in numerous voices rendered in different typefaces, but Shy's remains the chief voice even as he is nearly appalled into silence by a chance encounter with death in the form of two dead badgers: "Fuuuuuuck's sake, he whines into his sleeve. Someone killed you?" Whether Shy will straighten up at the end of this slender, lyrical tale is anyone's guess, but, touchingly, even the "dangerous young men" at Last Chance, assumed to be lost causes and incorrigible, encourage Shy at least to come to grips with his feelings. Porter does a fine job of inhabiting the mind of a teenager in ways that may remind readers of David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green, with all the confusion and lack of resolution that come with the territory. Laughs most definitely do not ensue, but Porter gets his bumbling, anomic antihero down to a T.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2023
Porter's (Lanny, 2019) well-deserved reputation for capturing the intricacies of how a mind works is reinforced in this recounting of a few hours in the life of a troubled teenager, Shy, who is at Last Chance, an institution for kids who have had difficult life experiences. As Shy walks through the night fields towards a pond carrying a rucksack of rocks, we learn in snippets about all that brought him to this place and time. Porter's writing, spare and specific, is uncanny in evoking rootedness as Shy's mind wanders between the past and the present, and Porter captures difficult emotions without wallowing in them. This novella's brevity belies the complicated themes it tackles as Porter illuminates Shy's despair, anger, delight in music, and eagerness to belong. The supporting characters--his mom, stepdad, teacher and peers--are deftly defined and anchor this teenager's particular angst even as this tale offers an unforgettable rendering of universal experiences of alienation and sorrow. Readers who appreciate a deep dive into the human psyche will recognize the grace with which Porter renders his poignant protagonist.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 2, 2023

Porter's follow-up to the Booker Prize--longlisted Lanny is yet another slim novel suffused with emotional weight beyond its word count, singular in form and raw in its portrayal of Shy, a troubled young man on the brink of adulthood. The narrative follows its titular teenager over the course of only a few nighttime hours, as he wanders out into the darkness with a rucksack full of rocks, away from Last Chance, a home for "very disturbed young men." Porter's language here is more urgent than readers have seen from him, portraying Shy's mercurial psychology with a style than lands somewhere between Joycean stream of consciousness and the distressing first-person interiority of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory. It's a fragmentary reading experience, as Shy's headspace is riddled with haunting memories and voices--of parents and therapists, confidants and tormentors--with Porter conveying this swirl of turmoil in a shifting typeface that adds to the work's viscerality. This formal experimentation coalesces to create a character defined by his profound emotional vacillations, shouting sound and fury into the void as he wrestles with his own fragility and contradictions. VERDICT A bold formal statement that's both a continuation of Porter's thematic interests and an artistic expansion; if it doesn't quite rise to the level of his previous work, fans of the author and adventurous readers alike should still find plenty to chew on.--Luke Gorham

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.