Gone Boy : A Walkabout

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The recent rash of school shootings makes Gibson's heartbreaking book as timely as it is good. Shortly before Christmas in 1992, an alienated, angry student named Wayne Lo went on a shooting rampage at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts, wounding four people and killing two, one of whom was Gibson's 18-year-old son, Galen. While grieving, Gibson embarked on what he calls a "walkabout," a search for the truth about his son's death: "I would concentrate on the details, the facts, and trust that their greater meaning would emerge, of its own accord, in the end. It never occurred to me to doubt that there was a greater meaning." At first, there was Lo's trial to occupy him, followed by a civil suit against the college. Gibson writes honestly about the rage that consumed him for the first few years after Galen's death. In a remarkable chapter, he describes a conversation with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, which owns Simon's Rock, in which he realized that assigning blame would serve no practical or spiritual purpose. Not that human fallibility didn't play a huge role in Galen's death: Gibson makes a compelling argument that Simon's Rock administrators had more than enough warning signs to prevent the tragedy. Lo's high-school teachers knew he was troubled. So did his college teachers. And his college friends and administrators knew he had a gun and ammunition. What makes this book special, and what distinguishes it from the blizzard of 30-second explanations and 800-word op-ed pieces on teen violence, is the way in which Gibson transcends his rage and becomes capable of mounting a searching, informative and ultimately deeply moving exploration into the combination of causality and randomness that surrounds his son's death. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

On December 14, 1992, during a shooting rampage at Simon's Rock College, Gibson's 18-year-old son, Galen, was shot and killed. In the aftermath, Gibson, an antiquarian bookseller in Gloucester, MA, embarked on this "walkabout" in order to make sense of his grief. His son's murder, he writes, was "a terrible blow and the greatest teaching the world had to offer. It was God's Will, but it had happened in the world and so it had causes....I figured out that if I concentrated on the worldly chain of causes I might finally work my way up to the God's Will part." In the course of his inquiry into guns, violence, privacy, and responsibility, Gibson decides that the real lesson is that we have to find forgiveness and "take the energy this horrible thing had released and turn it around somehow and send it back out there, clean, so the world might be a better place for it." An emotionally moving, important story; recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries.--Robert C. Jones, formerly of Central Missouri State Univ., Warrensburg Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Megan Harlan

In 1992, the authors teenage son was murdered during a random shooting spree by an extremely disturbed fellow student Wayne Lo, at their small Massachusets college, Simon's Rock...Only when he establishes a friendship with the other gone boy's parents—the Lo's, distraught by their son's crime and lifelong imprisonment—does Gibson finally transcend his own grief in this wrenching, cathartic memoir.

Entertainment Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

A father transforms the attempt to fathom his son's senseless murder into a complex, surprising account of memory and discovery amid dark American corners of insanity, gun violence, and malfeasance. Gibson's staid life as an antiquarian bookseller was demolished by the death of his 18-year-old son, Galen, in a 1992 mass shooting at Simon's Rock College by student Wayne Lo. With the school uncommunicative, his family lost to grief, and their civil suit against the college stalemated, he descended into drinking, dark fantasy, and loosed moorings, then ultimately righted himself by embarking upon a (vehicular) "walkabout" in an effort to understand Galen's death. This results in a meandering narrative in which Gibson's propulsive loss is leavened by wry humor and increasing awareness of his situation's contemporary singular absurdity. He explores Lo's path to murder, the ramifications of firearms availability, and the role of the college, law enforcement, and psychology in the case's disposition, always with startling, engrossing results. Though his family's heartbreak at Galen's loss makes for tough reading, it's to Gibson's credit as a debut author that his rangy prose and concise aggregate of observation draws one in thoroughly. Rarely maudlin, his book resonates with the paradoxical relationship between fathers and sons and the harder-edged interactions among today's confused, rigidly bohemian youth. And his attempts to comprehend the terrible enigma of Wayne Lo are also invaluable, given that Lo's act is practically a template for the mass shootings that have become a pox on the nation. Yet there's another dark story here: an instance in which present-day hesitancies towardjudgment and action result in a catastrophic institutional failure. Gibson finds numerous ways in which college officials thwarted security personnel and missed opportunities to interrupt Lo in his weapon acquisition. (After years of insurance-company wrangling, an undisclosed settlement was reached.) This book should be seriously considered by education professionals, as well as by violence survivors who might benefit from Gibson's singular odyssey.