PARADISE OUTLAWS

Personal reminiscence, literary analysis, biography, and historical overview: this volume throws every critical tool possible at its protagonists—the Beat triumvirate of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac—only to produce a mishmash of sycophantic praise and endless personal anecdote. The opening vignette of Paradise Outlaws combines a polemic against the tenets of New Criticism with a eulogy to a king setter named Shantih, and such a bizarre conflation of ideas sets the tone for a book undermined at every turn by its lack of focus. Tytell’s exuberance offers only obvious insights into his subjects’ otherwise fascinating lives, including such banalities as how the Beats rejected the values of America’s Puritan heritage and felt stifled by the rampant conformity of the 1950s. The real hero of Paradise Outlaws seems to be Tytell himself: he desperately wants his readers to know that he was personally acquainted with these writers. Unfortunately, Tytell appears to be merely the Kato Kaelin of the Beat circle, always there at the right moment to be caught in a photograph. Nevertheless, the authorial presence thus destroys the objectivity needed to explore the work of his beloved friends. The main personal photographs of the Beats and their circle, taken by Tytell’s wife, Mellon, contribute the book’s only remarkable feature. Raw with candor and spontaneity, the pictures capture the men and their world in moments of sparkling clarity; such photos as one of Burroughs standing in his nattiest attire before a noose and Ginsberg sitting in his Cherry Valley, N.Y., kitchen capture their subjects in rare and personal moments. With so many wonderful photographs of the Beats and the people who shared their countercultural world, Paradise Outlaws could have been a great coffee-table book, if only it had been envisioned as such.