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Breakfast
with Scot is not your grandfather's poor little orphan
story. The title character, 11-year-old Scot, would not be
caught dead asking for a bit more stale porridge, but he might
show up at someone's door dressed to the nines in thrift store
apparel found mostly in the women-over-55 section and armed
with silk flowers and a hot glue gun.
Scot,
you see, is a sissy of the highest order—a boy who at
one point, trying on a new coat in a department store, exclaims,
enraptured, "Oh, Ed. Isn't it a dream? I can't wait to wear
it with my new brown bucks." After the death of his mother,
a mediocre painter and veteran drug addict, flamboyantly colorful,
emotionally neglected, socially awkward Scot is not exactly
left alone in the world—the world just isn't quite sure
what what to make of him.
Unwanted
by his extended family, abandoned by the closest thing to
a father he has ever known (his mother's longtime ex-boyfriend,
Billy), Scot is shuffled off to live with Billy's brother
Sam and his partner Ed—a sophisticated, upper middle
class gay couple living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Told
from the point of view of the particularly reluctant Ed, Breakfast
with Scot successfully navigates the potentially maudlin
waters of heartwarming family stories. This is due as much
as to Ed's breezy, wry wit as to author Michael Downing's
quick, clever dialogue and his portrait of Scot as a quirk-ridden,
skeptical, and achingly vulnerable kid with an unparalleled
fondness for both people and experimental scarves.
For a
character-driven piece, the pace of the novel moves along
briskly, following the misadventures of Ed and Sam as new
parents. Together, they try to strike a balance between letting
Scot be who he is and guiding him through a world that treats
effeminate boys as unnatural, marked, and potentially contagious.
What ensues is a poignant exploration of family, parenting,
gender and personal identity, and the curiously vague, unspoken
laws of heteronormative culture—laws that Scot breaks
as easily as he breathes.
Faced
with Scot's fey mannerisms and kitschy style, the adults who
cross his path are laid bare by how they respond to him. As
Ed says at one point of his young ward, for most people, a
run in with Scot is like an encounter session with one's self.
What the other characters find in that mirror is not always
pretty, but it is strikingly human.
While
Scot is the engine on which this story runs, this novel is
really about Ed, who spends his time away from home trading
oblique barbs with his hipster best friend at the chic and
incomprehensibly silly Italian magazine where they both work.
And here is the thing about Ed: This is a character who could
so easily be reduced to an unending fountain of vapid, catty
superficiality—the kind of role to which gay guys are
so often reduced in the movies and on television. In Downing's
hands, Ed is simultaneously the snarky fish out of water and
the new parent who can't help but identify with his "little
sissy." If Sam is the natural born parent in this story and
the emotionally mature rock, then Ed is the overgrown kid
who, as much to his own surprise as anyone else's, finds that
he can't help but fight for the happiness of this strangely
wonderful and wonderfully strange little boy.
When
Ed worries about whether he's raising a future drag queen
or a future drug addict, he's concerned not just about the
behavior modeled for Scot by the boy's late mother, but about
the pain of growing up in a homophobic world and what it might
be doing to this kid, whether he turns out to be actually
gay or not. What is unspoken here, rendered carefully invisible
by the author and yet undeniably informing Ed's character
is how Ed himself has been wounded in this way. It shows in
his distant relationship with his own family, in his detached
humor, and, on occasion, in his emotionally retarded but daring
approach to damage control for Scot, his own relationship
with Sam, and the world in general. Ed, like the other characters
here, is presented as being flawed but earnest—ill-equipped,
but increasingly moved by Scot's indomitable capacity for
love. You really can't help but root for this unlikely trio
as it stakes its tentative claim on becoming a family. And
if you can? No neckerchief for you.
(March,
2008)
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