Brutish and Short

On "Shy" by Max Porter & "Brutes" by Dizz Tate.

Shy, Max Porter (2023)

It’s truly bittersweet when a writer sets the extraordinarily high bar against which their own later work doesn’t measure up. On the one hand, Max Porter gave us in Grief is the Thing With Feathers (2015) a book unlike any other, one that deftly balances high ideas and craft with visceral emotion. On the other hand, that first book looms so large over everything else he has written. As a reader, I cannot let go of knowing just what Porter is capable of and therefore feeling at times deflated by his latest book.

Shy unfolds over a single night in which our titular hero sneaks out of Last Chance, a home for wayward boys that is either too on-the-nose in its name or sardonically wry, depending on the reader’s tastes. He has filled his backpack with heavy stones and is making for a nearby pond. We know enough early on to understand what Shy’s plan is, and it’s a mark of how Porter always trusts his reader’s intelligence that it is never spelled out. As Shy travels thr…