Chaos
"Stuart: A Life Backwards"
By Alexander Masters

I stayed up late the other night to finish this book and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

This is a biography of Stuart Shorter, a mentally unstable, physically disabled, drug and alcohol addicted, often violent, often homeless guy in Britain. Masters, who was working in shelters and studying for a degree in social services at the time, met Shorter and decided to write a book about him. After showing him the manuscript, Shorter tells Masters to rewrite it backwards, like a murder mystery to show "who killed the boy that I was." So Masters does, interspersing the present action with progressively earlier periods from Stuart's past. But before he finishes, Stuart walks in front of a train, accidentally or not, and is killed.

Yes, this is pretty heavy stuff, but what's remarkable about the book is that Masters doesn't let it get overwhelming. Silly, simple line drawings show up every few pages to illustrate the story, and he keeps a surprisingly light touch. What's more, Stuart, despite being a person who has done unforgiveable things, despite being exasperating, annoying and chaotic, comes across as strangely likeable. I'm sure that's moreso on the page than in the flesh: Masters wants to throttle the guy half of the time.

I'm not sure what to take away from all this. Masters traces Stuart's problems back to his repeatedly being molested by his brother, a baby sitter and a teacher. But Stuart himself is more circumspect, and chides Masters for wanting to tie everything up so neatly. If it hadn't been the problem with his brother, he says, he still would have had the physical impairment, he still would have had a violent drunk for his biological father. He points out that other people have had similar backgrounds, or even worse, and yet they haven't become chaotic. And some people who have become that way didn't have abusive backgrounds at all.

So, if Masters was trying to write a mystery novel, like Stuart suggested, he failed. But he succeeded in writing something captivating, funny, sad and moving.


You know what else? The next day after I finished reading "Stuart," I was walking with my son down West Portal and this homeless panhandler guy in a motorcycle jacket was admiring him. A little while later we ran into him again and he said to me, "You know, I had a lot of hate in my heart until I saw that little guy."