Shy - Max Porter [Review]

I’m genuinely relieved I watched the film adaptation “Steve” first, because without that grounding to help guide me through the book I’d have been lost. The film gives you narrative scaffolding; time, space, cause-and-effect, emotional build-up, even moments of warmth and accidental tenderness. It’s bleak, sure, but it explains how these boys ended up here, not just that they did.

The book doesn’t bother with any of that. It runs as a stream of consciousness split across formats and timelines; present-day suicide attempt, scattered memories, classroom noise, institutional haze, and pseudo-transcript inserts, all layered rather than shaped. The stylistic intent is obvious, but the reading experience becomes exhausting rather than immersive.

The contrast with the film is stark. In the film, you’re encouraged to understand the boys. They are damaged and volatile and capable of softness, humour, and embarrassment. You see how they were built, chipped, warped, and occasionally rescued by tiny flickers of love or loyalty. You can’t even hate them, because you’re given enough human context to stop you doing so. On the page, you’re handed isolated incidents; Shy giving a girl a dead leg mid sex and smashing up a family friend’s living room, incidents he can’t fully explain and the reader doesn't have the resources to make sense of. They’re just a splattering of events. The moments are dramatic, but they don’t feel connected to anything deeper.

It’s a very short, experimental book. It has the air of a project not fully complete, something half the length of the intended finished product. There’s clearly a full novel’s worth of emotional material here, but the chosen format never gives it enough space to develop into something meaningful that you can connect with.

I genuinely think the worst, though, is the printing error in the UK paperback, where a double-page spread is printed back-to-back and the intended visual effect collapses. When a book leans heavily on layout and typography, potentially more than any actual narrative, that lack of attention feels careless. If you want the reader to treat the form as part of the meaning, you need to respect the reader.

The film proves there’s a powerful, complicated, desperately sad story here. The book can’t sit with it long enough to become one.