Shy by Max Porter
Max Porter's highly anticipated fourth novel Shy is a hallucinatory, fragmentary journey through its eponymous character's internal landscape
When it comes to an author’s fourth book, especially an author as widely read and highly acclaimed as Max Porter, it can feel like you know what to expect. You look for the repetitions and the places you recognise. Perhaps this searching for the familiar is a reaction to Porter’s specific style, the way he unmoors the happenings of his characters from their own characterisation – as always, we piece together personhoods from snippets and asides.
Shy is a book that unfolds through happening, rhythms and memories. We are used to Porter’s identification of the Other; and its intertwining with land and feeling. In Shy, the Other is closer in, less of the land and its mythologies and more facets of the internal lands – the turbulence of Shy’s (our protagonist) moods, his life, his emotions. Porter articulates over and over the anguish of the loss of control, the confusion in the face of the adult world and the complex web of desire, shame and frustration that runs through youth and masculinity; occasionally manifesting itself in violent acts that punctuate the text.
This is a book that occasionally hurts to read, the unflinching point-of-view holding together a narrative sidling through memory, dream and hallucinatory other-thans; carrying us through the excruciation of not being understood, not being able to express, and not understanding why things are happening.
