Shy
A Novel
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3.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you’re not alone, soon to be adapted as the major motion picture STEVE, starring Cillian Murphy
This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.
You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.
He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.
Got your special meds, nutcase?
He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.
The night is huge and it hurts.
In Shy, Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began with Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and continued with Lanny. But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent? Shy is a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This explosive, experimental novel doesn’t just describe the plight of a troubled teen—it puts you in his head. Shy is a British boy who’s gone through and gotten into every kind of trouble you can name. He’s consumed by a whirlwind of intense, uncontrollable emotions—fear, anger, lust, violence, embarrassment—and he’s fighting for a foothold in life at Last Chance, an educational alternative for teenagers in crisis. His struggle to connect with his teachers, family, and schoolmates is the story’s core. But it’s like no other novel we’ve encountered. Author Max Porter makes us understand Shy by experiencing his thought process from the inside out, using fragmented language and a stream-of-consciousness flow in place of traditional narrative structure. Before it’s over, we’ve been psychologically buffeted about nearly as much as Shy. But we’ve gotten a greater understanding of human nature in the bargain. This might not be where you’d want to live, but it’s an unforgettable place to visit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
