nique, yes. Inspiring? It depends. Masters allows Stuart, his tragicomic homeless antihero, acres of crawlspace: he can narrate, scrawl, and fume. A London vagrant for decades, Stuart’s life is a “hum of casual outrages.”
The homeless, Masters says, accept the “death of companionship” and often turn life into mean-spirited solipsism. Stuart, who evolves into Masters’ dark buddy, is both sympathetic and enraging. Sometimes Stuart is just embroidered babble (“If words were legs he’d be a billionipede. Yap, yap, yap.”)
This book wins the sympathy vote — how can such an authentic chronicle of homelessness not? — but depends wholly on poor Stuart to carry the narrative load. It’s quite a burden, with erratic results. So much good intention is too much weight.
