Will's Way

About the Book

Homelessness is a subject rarely chronicled by those who have lived it.  Those who have endured it are seldom able to recount their experiences in an intelligent, detached manner.  Will's Way is a fictionalized account of one person’s ordeal as a homeless alcoholic in "paradise."  

Will Tyne, a 37-year-old native North Carolinian who has lived in Manhattan for the past ten years, decides to abandon big-city life and move to Hawaii.  A reasonably smart man, he has only been modestly successful in New York, partly because of his progressive alcoholism, about which he is in a deep state of denial. He arrives in Hawaii and discovers a society that is somewhat closed to mainlanders who move there to live.

After two months of halfheartedly searching for work and continuing to drink, Will is evicted from the Waikiki hotel in which he has been staying.  He is forced to stay at a shelter for the homeless, but refuses to apply for public assistance until he begins to sense that there is no way out of the shelter. Will meets some idiosyncratic people and endures some difficult but sometimes humorous circumstances and, after four months at the shelter, sober for a few days because he is out of money and waiting for his first welfare check, Will briefly meets Karen Ling, an affluent thirty-something woman of Asian ancestry who is the chief administrator of the shelter.  In his lucid state, he is struck by her sincerity and wholesome beauty.

However, Will gets his first welfare check, and quickly but finally hits bottom on alcohol.  He enters a treatment program, and ends up going to live in a "recovery" house for alcoholics.  Months after he has begun an attempt at a climb from his alcoholic abyss, he sees a newspaper editorial Karen Ling has written and writes her a letter praising her for her efforts at the shelter and telling her about his attempt at a new start.  To his surprise, Karen responds to his letter.

The ensuing sequence of events reveals the trials, triumphs and disappointments that are bound to occur when a man who is already struggling to reach level ground sets his sights on higher goals than the ones he seems capable of attaining.

The principal purport of the Will’s Way is its perspective of alcoholism leading to homelessness in a multicultural society, the aspects never seen--probably never even imagined--by the general public; and facets certainly never covered by the news media.  Its prose is straightforward, lucid, and unflinching.

Will’s Way offers a vivid depiction of the day-to-day experiences of a “street person,” seen from the tawdry underbelly of a place considered by millions to be paradise.

About the Author

Rob Benton is a native North Carolinian who has resided in New York and Singapore, and who has adopted Honolulu as his home. His first published writing was a short piece of literary criticism, accomplished when he was eighteen years old. As a collegian, he studied creative writing under the tutelage of the esteemed Southern writer, Ovid Williams Pierce. After many years of working in various clerical jobs, Rob Benton returned his focus to writing in early 1995. Will’s Way, a fictionalized account of Benton’s own decline into homelessness as a result of alcoholism, is his first novel. He is currently at work on a sequel. Rob Benton is an alumnus of East Carolina University, and a member of MENSA and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.