Dance real slow

In this luminous debut, Michael Grant Jaffe tells the story of Gordon Nash, a part-time lawyer whose wife abruptly walks away from both marriage and motherhood, leaving Gordon sole responsibility for raising their child, Calvin. Father and son settle in a small Kansas town, "the very solar plexus of the country," where Calvin dreams of owning a horse someday, and where he displays the quirks and curious habits of a precocious four-year-old: toting around a dead man-o-war in a mason jar, filching disinfectant pucks from urinals, and sleeping on the closet floor. Though Gordon shows far more…