You Are Here: A Memoir of Arrival

Rating:
Summary: ¿There¿s too much of everything; and not much of anything"
Review: Wesley Gibson has written a subtle and astute novel, which is dense and complex, yet also has a light and breezy quality to it. At once funny, acerbic, and at the same time melancholy and bittersweet, Gibson has written a type of personal essay or dissertation on his life. You are Here: A Memoir of Arrival is obviously an autobiographical account of his time in New York, but Gibson has cleverly used the medium of fiction, and has woven the perceptive use of narrative, language and metaphor into an absolutely brilliant journal come confessional. There's so much to appreciate in this book, as Wesley recounts, with a certain cynicism and wry humour, his experiences living and coping with his roommates John, who is terminally ill with lung cancer, and Alan, the disparate and disaffected scene queen who is "scrabbling through life, just taking care of number one because there isn't another living soul there to do it for you."

Wesley is such a markedly new antihero, as he stumbles " back to the real human blood, thick with life" in New York. He uses his wile and cunning to find an apartment with a reasonably sane roommate, while applying for a series of low paying, "easy money, my kind of hours, pack of weirdo" jobs as a waiter, telemarketer and a creative writing teacher, where he "loves the speedy nights, the easy money and the strange hours." Meantime the narrative is peppered with his insights and thoughts as he recalls the reasons he first "arrived" in the city that never sleeps. Gibson writes with a wit and a profound sense of emotion that absolutely astonishes. And his urban adventures reveal much about the meaning of family and the bonds that can bring almost total strangers together. The scourge of AIDS bought a lot of disparate people in concert; particularly gay men who happened to be estranged from their family, and this issue is at the thematic heart of this book. Gibson is really presenting a startlingly compassionate story of people - isolated friends and acquaintances - who in times of crisis are flung together in the most unlikely of scenarios.

Gibson also has some interesting and perceptive things about what it is like to be gay, even in this enlightened and markedly tolerant world, and he draws some interesting comparisons with his working class upbringing in Richmond, Virginia with his life in the multi-sexual world of New York. For Wesley, to be gay is to live, always with a certain "hesitation" however slight, out there in the world. Whether he's ruminating on the soft-core pornographic tidbits of the Robyn Bird Show (which is as outrageous as he describes), or telling us about the local gay, neighborhood "kitchenette-size piano bar" Diamonds, or even trying to pull his oversized neighbor off the toilet, Gibson never looses his wry sense of humor or his narrative focus. You Are Here: A Memoir of Arrival is a wonderfully honest and bittersweet work, and is a real literary treasure.

Michael

Rating:
Summary: Place This Book High On Your Must-Read List!
Review: Wesley Gibson is an extraordinarily fine writer. YOUR ARE HERE: A Memoir of Arrival is that rare breed of book that combines autobiographical information filtered through a storyteller's gift of fiction that enhances the presence of the written word. And Gibson is such a finely tuned wordsmith that he is able to, within the space of one page, make the reader howl with laughter and then feel the internalized, longstanding turmoil that makes his characters so vital.

Raised in the South (Richmond, Virginia) with all of its odd family values, social codes, religiosity, and homophobia, Gibson concentrates his memoir on his transplantation to New York City,
the "HERE" of the title. Quite different from the end-of-the-rainbow aura that Gotham has for most writers and readers and artists and dreamers and, well, all of us, Gibson peels the layers off the city that never sleeps, letting us know just how difficult it is to exist there. His many jobs, his apartment hunting through the gay roommating service, his over the edge hypochondria, his work as a telemarketer, his endless attempts to be the writer he knows he can be... all of these themes are populated with curious people (few characters drawn in contemporary fiction are as hilarious-yet tragic as the morbidly obese Mr. McNally he has to rescue from the toilet seat). Curious, and yet tragic also: John his male nurse roommate whose horrendous cough ultimately is diagnosed as lung cancer, his other roommate Alan who is seen only briefly between the sounds of tricks, joyful Jo Ann his dearest friend, his own PWA dates from whom he attracts scabies, and the rest of the co-players in this novel.

Gibson peppers his memoir with many insights on being a gay man.
"To be gay is to live, with a certain hesitancy, however slight, out there in the world. Even when it only flickers through you, you can't help wondering how the day thing is going to play itself out with your sister's new husband, in that class you're teaching, at some stupid party. It's born from the understanding that the simple act of walking down the street could be enough to instigate the day of your death. etc" "I'd never been much of a theater queen, but I had my own longings of a literary kind, and as far as I knew, no amusing caricatures of me had ever appeared in the New York Review of Books, my Broadway. That was the problem with bars. Everyone's dreams seem to leak and get all over the floor." "In the mirror , I was still recognizably human; but the icy and amphibious blood of a New Yorker trying to survive was beginning to course through my veins." And "It seemed like a fitting inheritance for a world where friends were family, and family were strangers, and you might find yourself helping someone else to die because you'd been yoked to them by accidents of commerce and the mysterious trick of your own sexual nature and some fumbling attempt at compassion."

As usual, excerpts chosen from an excellent novel serve as the best criticism and notice of a writer's genius. Reading YOU ARE HERE is a joy and clearly one of those I-can't-put-it-down books that come around all too seldom. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Place This Book High On Your Must-Read List!
Review: Wesley Gibson is an extraordinarily fine writer. YOUR ARE HERE: A Memoir of Arrival is that rare breed of book that combines autobiographical information filtered through a storyteller's gift of fiction that enhances the presence of the written word. And Gibson is such a finely tuned wordsmith that he is able to, within the space of one page, make the reader howl with laughter and then feel the internalized, longstanding turmoil that makes his characters so vital.

Raised in the South (Richmond, Virginia) with all of its odd family values, social codes, religiosity, and homophobia, Gibson concentrates his memoir on his transplantation to New York City,
the "HERE" of the title. Quite different from the end-of-the-rainbow aura that Gotham has for most writers and readers and artists and dreamers and, well, all of us, Gibson peels the layers off the city that never sleeps, letting us know just how difficult it is to exist there. His many jobs, his apartment hunting through the gay roommating service, his over the edge hypochondria, his work as a telemarketer, his endless attempts to be the writer he knows he can be... all of these themes are populated with curious people (few characters drawn in contemporary fiction are as hilarious-yet tragic as the morbidly obese Mr. McNally he has to rescue from the toilet seat). Curious, and yet tragic also: John his male nurse roommate whose horrendous cough ultimately is diagnosed as lung cancer, his other roommate Alan who is seen only briefly between the sounds of tricks, joyful Jo Ann his dearest friend, his own PWA dates from whom he attracts scabies, and the rest of the co-players in this novel.

Gibson peppers his memoir with many insights on being a gay man.
"To be gay is to live, with a certain hesitancy, however slight, out there in the world. Even when it only flickers through you, you can't help wondering how the day thing is going to play itself out with your sister's new husband, in that class you're teaching, at some stupid party. It's born from the understanding that the simple act of walking down the street could be enough to instigate the day of your death. etc" "I'd never been much of a theater queen, but I had my own longings of a literary kind, and as far as I knew, no amusing caricatures of me had ever appeared in the New York Review of Books, my Broadway. That was the problem with bars. Everyone's dreams seem to leak and get all over the floor." "In the mirror , I was still recognizably human; but the icy and amphibious blood of a New Yorker trying to survive was beginning to course through my veins." And "It seemed like a fitting inheritance for a world where friends were family, and family were strangers, and you might find yourself helping someone else to die because you'd been yoked to them by accidents of commerce and the mysterious trick of your own sexual nature and some fumbling attempt at compassion."

As usual, excerpts chosen from an excellent novel serve as the best criticism and notice of a writer's genius. Reading YOU ARE HERE is a joy and clearly one of those I-can't-put-it-down books that come around all too seldom. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: (4.5)A work of staggering genius
Review: Wesley Gibson is determined to get a foothold in New York City and escape the small town mentality of his southern roots. He jumps at an opportunity to rent an available room in an apartment where there are two roommates who never seem to materialize. The place boasts a plaid living room suite, tiny wizards made from crystals perched in groups on end tables and an answering machine with sixty messages and counting. So begins the life of a gay man in the city of his dreams.

Gibson reads like David Eggars, only I can track this writer's logic without losing my mind. At thirty-six, Gibson is an astute observer of humanity, starting with his own unnerving penchant for hypochondria. Faced with the unsolvable mystery of the ghost-roommates, John and Alan, Wesley is thrust into an emotional vacuum, struggling to find a job, depending on his also-neurotic friend Jo Ann to stabilize the waves of intermittent hysteria that overtake his best intentions. When Gibson finally does run across the primary roommate... well, that's a story you'll have to find out for yourself.

With shattering wit, Gibson shares life in New York City, his fragmented psyche, scrambling for work, living with a roommate in denial. New York is purposefully seductive: great crowds of strangers, anonymity and the gay social scene. Gibson writes with an abundance of humor; but when he grapples with a life and death situation, he has the necessary gravitas. This author's particular skill is that he is able to wax hysterical while his rowboat takes on water, a testament to his remarkable spirit and delightful personality.

Wesley addresses his youth and southern homophobia in the 70's with somber honesty. There, like vampires, gays only come out at night and in accepted venues; as young men bloom into manhood, their sexual antennae identify those who deviate from the norm. As for living gay in a straight world, "the simple act of walking down the street could be enough to instigate the day of your death."

Gibson is remarkably generous, with an abundance of imperfections, opinions and a serendipitous imagination, his view of the world penetrating and precise. For every humorous anecdote, there is one of reflection, unflinching in the glare of reality. This modern-day-gay man lives his days at full throttle or crushed into hypochondriac immobility, with an uncanny charm that embraces the reader as a bosom buddy. Gibson may not live the macho writer's life of an O'Hara or a Steinbeck, but he certainly speaks the most important language of all, the language of the human heart. Luan Gaines/2004.