BALLAD OF THE WAYWARD CHILD

Renken chronicles a gay boy’s coming of age in this literary novel-in-stories.

Childhood is a nonstop series of lessons, most of them learned the hard way. In the first episode of Renken’s novel, his protagonist, 6-year-old Ike, is innocently walking away from his grandmother’s porch when a hand reaches for him from an open doorway. The story ends, and the novel moves on before readers get any details, but the incident haunts Ike—it’s whispered of by neighbors, and remembered sadly by his grandmother—for the rest of the book. With each story, Ike grows a year older and learns a new harsh truth about the world: Other kids don’t like books as much as he does; his older brother can easily hurt him; dressing up in women’s clothes with his best friend will get him yelled at by his mother. On the family farm, the weak, creative Ike is a constant disappointment to his father, who wants him to grow up to be a farmer or a minister. As the years pass, Ike comes more into himself, one experience at a time—including his first kiss with a boy in his tent at summer camp; going away to college, where his two inaugural sexual experiences could hardly be more different from one another; and getting married and eventually cheating on his husband. Renken effectively varies the stories, switching points of view and format; one story takes the form of a fitness diary, in which a teenage Ike records the horrors of gym class. Other stories break unexpectedly into verse. Strewn throughout are looks into the isolated lives led by seemingly everybody Ike encounters. Max, one of the first men Ike sleeps with, guesses that Ike will regret doing it the next day. “You’ll feel awkward and you won’t be able to look me in the eye…But it will be okay. It really will. It’ll be okay.” From such fragments, a memorable portrait emerges.

An affecting fictional biography told in episodes strung across a quarter-century.