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Booker Prize-winning author Douglas Stuart discusses his third novel, John of John, about a young man seeking to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family's expectations and a devout upbringing on Scotland's Isle of Harris. Find out how he sought to balance intimacy and secrecy, community and isolation, all before the Internet arrived in a place where "time moves slowly... and memory is long."
The Writer's Life
Douglas Stuart: It's Not a Novelist's Place to Judge
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| photo: Desiree Adams |
Douglas Stuart is the author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020) and Young Mungo (2022). In his third novel, John of John (Grove Press; reviewed in this issue), a young man seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family's expectations and a devout upbringing on Scotland's Isle of Harris. Stuart was born in Scotland and has a background in fashion design; he lives with his husband in Manhattan.
What did you observe about then versus now on the Western Isles? How did you try to balance a waning way of life and a beloved community? What role does the Gaelic language play?
Time moves slowly on the islands and memory is long. John of John is set in 1997 because I wanted to capture a pre-Internet world, not only because it has revolutionized rural places, but also because it has changed the face of gay dating and queer loneliness. I'm interested in the isolation that people feel most intensely despite the closeness of a tight-knit community--which of course, always comes with an expectation of conformity.
There is no one singular truth about the islands. You can find all the benefits and problems of the broader world there and yet there remains a strong culture that can't be found anywhere else in the world. In all my novels, people are pitted against place. Rural populations are dwindling and communities are aging rapidly. Any young person left behind faces real social and romantic challenges.
Scottish Gaelic is spoken by the tiniest fraction of the population, mostly concentrated on the Outer Hebrides. In the novel, language is used as a device to exclude people, to talk around them. John, the father, speaks to his son, Cal, in Gaelic, as a way to claim Cal as his own and exclude the grandmother, Ella, from their conversations. It's quite childish and mean, but I think the novel is all about these triangles, about the ways families can warp in isolation.
I sensed real love and respect for all the characters, even those with problematic views or behaviors. How did you cultivate empathy and resist villain stereotypes?
I don't believe in villains or heroes. It's too easy. In my own life, I've been most bitterly disappointed by people I have thought the world of, and surprised by the generosity of others who owed me nothing. My mother suffered with a terrible addiction that eventually killed her, and I realized at the age of four that the person you love most in the world can also be the person who is worst to you. A terrible lesson for a child, but a valuable lesson for the novelist.
It's not a novelist's place to judge. And in fact, the more complex you can make a character--the more morally contradictory they can be--then the more human they feel. The struggle is often internal, with each character struggling with the opposing forces of their faith and sexuality. All I can do is present some people and their pain and let readers come to their own moral judgements.
Avoiding spoilers (which was challenging while writing the review!), what did you hope to convey through the repeating of family patterns?
A lot happens in the second half of the book, so thank you for avoiding spoilers! There is very little that is new under the sun, and I wanted to write about the power of secrets, how we hold onto them for fear of being exposed, while not thinking that others might be going through the very same thing.
It's a novel about fathers and sons. It's a particular flaw of masculinity: fathers always want to make their sons in their own image. I think it comes from how narrowly masculinity is expressed in the world. Men spend an enormous amount of energy oppressing themselves and the men around them, which at the end of the day means they're upholding systems they would do better to destroy.
On the other hand, I was interested in the arrogance of youth. How when we were young people we didn't yet see our elders as people in their own right. We believed that we were the only ones living interesting lives full of love and secrets and desire.
Often, the universal dilemma in queer fiction is the story of a young person hiding their sexuality from their family, and so I simply imagined what would happen if that family were hiding their own secrets, too. It was an exercise in tension and claustrophobia for me. The Macleods are a family who are so tightly woven: they work together, eat together, pray together, and they know things about one another on such an intimate level, and yet, could I make it so that the reader saw that they did not know each other at all?
We imagine that secrets are a way to cover our sins, but what if they were also a way to protect those you love?
There are several strong women in the novel, but Ella must have been my favorite character. Who inspired her depiction?
I love Ella. She was the most fun to write. The Macleod men are so repressed and so I needed to create a grandmother who was the keeper of the truth, a woman who was never afraid to speak her mind. I wanted to create someone fleshy and alive, someone full of humour and irreverence, someone who loved dirty talk.
Ella is her grandson's best friend, and it was important that she was a Glaswegian because I wanted her to also feel like an outsider on the islands. In many ways, Ella is a composite of all the women who raised me. These were women who had spent their lives letting the men think they had control and yet they were the ones who were really in charge. I admired them so much. They were confronted with men who lacked any emotional intelligence and yet they had to manage them, survive them, and also help them succeed in the world. As they aged, they reached the point in their lives where they had nothing left to fear, no man left to please.
As I approached the end of the novel, I had to slow down for dread of full-blown tragedy. (I loved Cal's line, "What in the world of Thomas Hardy?") And yet there is humor and hope here, often in spite of abuse and cause for despair. Did you set out to write a happy ending?
I'm sure the critics are going to savage me for that Hardy line! But it's so true. We are still a world governed by Victorian morality--what could destroy a young man in 1890 could still undo him in 1990.
I think I set out to write an ending that liberated everyone and rewarded love for its patience. But I also hope the reader is so concerned about Cal's journey that the ending comes as something of a surprise. I realized that we can never be truly happy or settled until those we love find their peace, too. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck
Australian author David Malouf, who "successfully merged his passion for literature, language and imagination with his connection to home to become one of Australia's most celebrated writers," died April 22 at age 92, the