Many young men die or go to jail in Dominic Gordon’s debut essay collection. They do stupid things when they’re wasted, get caught tagging trains or shoplifting. “We loved trains and we loved stealing,” he writes. They graduate from petty crime to more serious offences, from recreational drug use to full-blown addiction. They don’t seem to spend much time with women. Gordon is right in the thick of it and you wonder, often, how he managed to survive and write this book.
I hesitate to call Excitable Boy a memoir, though the material that Gordon draws on is autobiographical. He flouts the conventions of the coming of age story, presenting an account of his adolescence and 20s that is fragmented, circular and discontinuous. He rides trains around Melbourne and walks its streets by night, a witness to crime, sex and violence, and a participant too. There’s little stable ground. His family moves often across Melbourne’s western suburbs; Gordon changes schools when they move, or when his frazzled parents want to get him away from bad influences.
