Max Porter’s Novel of Troubled and Enchanted Youth

Shy, the teen-aged namesake of Max Porter’s new novel, is a character out of the op-ed sections of newspapers—a troubled young man who has “sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose,” and worse. Mum is heartbroken. Stepdad Iain doesn’t understand why Shy can’t straighten out, join the real world of golf and cars and home improvement. The three of them live in England, in 1995, and, along with his mother’s “snotty repetitive questions” and Iain’s heavy sighs, hardcore rave mixtapes form the soundtrack to Shy’s life. Unlike the rest of adolescence, music “promises, and it delivers”; it “welcomes him in” and loves him back.