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Excitable Boy
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2025
‘I am trying to piece together the events that have led me to be here in this room with an old man trapped in 1989, a kid with an acquired brain injury, and a girl struggling to survive. I’ve been drifting for years but I don’t want to drift any more.’
I opened this collection of essays and walked into a world both familiar and foreign. I don’t know Dominic Gordon, but I have known quite a few people with similar experiences. Not everyone survives. In Mr Gordon’s debut essay collection, many of the young men he knows die or end up in gaol. The risky behaviour of children escalates for some: drug use becomes addiction, petty theft segues into more serious crime, graffiti becomes a way of making a mark, of having an impact on a world in which the perpetrator is often invisible.
I kept reading, uncomfortable with the behaviours described, captivated by the language used, wondering what would happen next. I recognise elements of the Melbourne described in these essays and elements of adolescence where the need to belong and to fit in is more important than the rules imposed by those who seem to occupy their own privileged society. And I remember some of those on similar journeys fifty or more years ago.
Three essays will stay with me: ‘State Library Victoria’, ‘Graff: The Writers’ Reality’ and ‘Spiralling in Stream C: Slow Days in the Newstart Alcove’. Mr Gordon’s writing is characterised by descriptive, detached and observant prose and demonstrates just how easy it can be to fall between the cracks.
I am glad I read it, rather than lived it.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
I opened this collection of essays and walked into a world both familiar and foreign. I don’t know Dominic Gordon, but I have known quite a few people with similar experiences. Not everyone survives. In Mr Gordon’s debut essay collection, many of the young men he knows die or end up in gaol. The risky behaviour of children escalates for some: drug use becomes addiction, petty theft segues into more serious crime, graffiti becomes a way of making a mark, of having an impact on a world in which the perpetrator is often invisible.
I kept reading, uncomfortable with the behaviours described, captivated by the language used, wondering what would happen next. I recognise elements of the Melbourne described in these essays and elements of adolescence where the need to belong and to fit in is more important than the rules imposed by those who seem to occupy their own privileged society. And I remember some of those on similar journeys fifty or more years ago.
Three essays will stay with me: ‘State Library Victoria’, ‘Graff: The Writers’ Reality’ and ‘Spiralling in Stream C: Slow Days in the Newstart Alcove’. Mr Gordon’s writing is characterised by descriptive, detached and observant prose and demonstrates just how easy it can be to fall between the cracks.
I am glad I read it, rather than lived it.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
January 17, 2026
In this collection of essays, life is parsed through the various perspectives and collated and collaged experiences of the author. It tells life as it is for the author, with clarity and specificity but it doesn't take you behind the curtain to know the "why." It leaves conclusions within the last paragraph of each essay and requires you to sit with the life lived and what happened.
You make a mosaic of a life from what is described, and that picture will be determined by your own lived experiences and background. It it not a life I have lived, but to have read it is to see the peripatetic truth of telling your own story in your own terms.
You make a mosaic of a life from what is described, and that picture will be determined by your own lived experiences and background. It it not a life I have lived, but to have read it is to see the peripatetic truth of telling your own story in your own terms.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews