Oh, Manchester, So Much To Answer For

Jim Gladstone’s debut novel, The Big Book of Misunderstanding (Southern Tier Editions, Harrington Park Press, 2002), is a surprising marvel. Where it initially feels like a laundry-list recounting of a gay boy’s childhood, it turns much deeper, delving into what makes a family, and what makes a family fracture slowly, over time, all the while charting the way to adulthood of a boy becoming a man – and realizing what it means for him to be gay. Joshua Royalton, the novel’s narrator (but not, perhaps, its protagonist; that would be his father, Harris), may only be 22 at story’s end, but has aged – or more accurately, learned – much more than that over the course of the book’s 239 pages. There were points at which I forgot I was reading fiction and mistakenly thought I was in the world of memoir, due to the clarity of Gladstone’s prose. [And, perhaps, to the fact that I so recently read Augusten Burroughs’ Dry and am currently working my way through Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s autobiography, as well.] Misunderstanding is a must-read for anyone who remembers the pain of coming out – or the pain of a youth in which your family seemed to watch your every move. Or, for that matter, anyone with a love for well-crafted, compelling coming-of-age fiction.