JACK KEROUAC

by Tom Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 1984

With the arrival of the second volume in Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's series of ""Album Biographies,"" it's harder than ever to discern a rationale for this quasi-academic project. Ross Macdonald (p. 74), by series editor Matthew J. Bruccoli, suggested that the subjects might be writers not usually given substantial literary treatment. Now, however, comes a flat, routine mini-biography of Jack Kerouac, whose life and work have been reported and analyzed in an avalanche of recent print--some of it distinguished. Clark (The World of Damon Runyon) adds little new material and offers no particular viewpoint on the Kerouac canon--which is defended against ""snobbish"" critics, treated with vague reverence, and given only occasional, hackneyed critical focus. (""The first-person prose of this novel achieves a unified sound like a great bop solo."") Kerouac's early life is sketched in with some emphasis on crucial shaping forces: the childhood death of his brother; his ""Canuck"" background; his father's bitter failures. But once Jack begins his vagabond ""Beat"" years--the Ginsberg/Burroughs circle, the alcoholism, the male-bonding obsessions, the writing experiments, the publishing frustrations, the fatal fame--Clark's narrative becomes thin, linear, and merely depressing, with the psychological mayhem largely reduced to dank gossip. Too superficial for involvement or insight, too detail-clotted for a satisfying short-take: an unnecessary addition to the already-crowded Kerouac-studies shelf--which, with the bewildering exception of Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters (absent from the bibliography here), Clark draws on extensively, unimaginatively.

Pub Date: May 31, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION