The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Two stories from the screen (one large, one small) immediately jumped to mind as I moved past the prologue of Eric Arvin’s Woke up in a Strange Place. First is the Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, and the second is the old Twilight Zone episode from my childhood where a man wandering down a country road realizes that he’s dead and tries to figure out where he’s going.

It might be that one has to have the right sort of perspective to embrace Arvin’s vision of afterlife; and I think one would also have to be in the right mood to really let this magical/spiritual journey pull you in.

Woke up in a Strange Place is essentially a biography of its central character, Joe, but told in reverse from the moment he awakes naked and without memories in a field of barley and has to rediscover himself. The people he meets along the way gradually reveal their significance to his life as his memories awake. The reader learns about Joe as Joe learns about himself. There is an intentionally dream-like, mythical quality to many of the settings through which we travel with Joe, and some of them might seem less pertinent to the impact of the story on the reader than others. Clearly they are meant to reflect the particulars of Joe’s personality and are not intended (I think) to offer generalities.

What makes Arvin’s use of this gradual, gentle awakening process effective as a narrative device is that it encourages the reader to replace the characters from Joe’s life with people we ourselves have known in our lives—or, at least, that’s what it did for me. With me, it was quite involuntary, but as I noted above, perhaps that’s because of who I am. It might be that Joe’s life just isn’t interesting enough on its own for some people (although I was constantly fascinated and anxious to move forward to each new discovery). But anyone with the slightest introspective bent may find themselves focusing on important moments in their own lives as Joe envisions key memories in his.

My life has been nothing at all like Joe’s, but I spent an awful lot of time as I read dwelling on my past and imagining how that might play out after my death in a world such as the one Arvin has created.

Arvin manages to keep the surprises coming right to the end. There is an expected denouement, foreshadowed from the very start; but it is accompanied by unexpected revelations that are shocking and moving; filled in equal measure with despair and hope.

Anyone who knows about Eric Arvin will know that he is himself caught up in a difficult time in his life. While he surely didn’t anticipate that when he wrote Woke up in a Strange Place, I can’t help but think that he will derive comfort in the greatness of his imagination and his heart, if this wonderful book offers us any insight into to who he is.