Thursday, February 19, 7 PM: Celebrating the Re-issue of Jan Kerouac's "Baby Driver": Reading, Discussion
Free Event. Books Available for Purchase.
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New York Review of Books (NYRB) has republished Jan Kerouac’s first book.
Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack Kerouac, lived in Eugene for some years in the Trainsong neighborhood. She worked at the Excelsior Cafe. Both Amanda Fortini, who wrote the Introduction, and Jan’s brother David Stuart will join us to read from the book and lead the discussion.
"My favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down. Gritty pointilism meets lyricism in this novel that reads like a spiritual how-to. How to rise above, how to survive, how to portray a life, and the complicated, neglectful people in that life, with magnanimity and honesty." --Heidi Julavits
Cover photo taken on Bell Avenue in Eugene by Jan’s brother David Stuart.
Annotation: "The first novel by Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack--a thrilling work of autobiographical fiction that hops from Mexico to Manhattan, Sante Fe to South America, describing with inspired detail a life colored by drugs, abandonment, loss, far-flung travel, occasional danger, and like her father, a relentless quest for pure experience. "Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue." Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. She and John, who introduced her to Beckett, Kafka, Joyce, and Dostoevsky, are writing a novel together. Before she can leave for Guadalajara where she plans to deliver her baby, she goes into labor three months early, and the baby is stillborn. She turns sixteen soon after and decides to head north."-
Biographical Note:
Janet Michelle (Jan) Kerouac (1952-1996) was born in Albany, New York, several months after her parents, the writer and Beat generation icon Jack Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty, separated. Raised by her mother on the Lower East Side of New York City, and unacknowledged by her father until age nine, Kerouac left home in her teens and traveled extensively in the United States, Mexico, and South America. She married John Lamb Lash, a writer, in San Francisco in 1968. She wrote three semi-autobiographical novels: Baby Driver (1981), which recalls her childhood in New York City and peripatetic youth; Train Song (1988), which chronicles her latest travels as an adult and further reckoning with her father's absence; and the unfinished Parrot Fever (2005), which was published posthumously. In 1996, she died of complications of kidney failure in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Amanda Fortiniis a columnist forCounty Highway, a frequent contributor toT: The New York Times Style Magazine, and has also written forThe New Yorker,The Believer,California Sunday, theLos Angeles Review of Books, andThe Paris Review, among other publications. A 2020 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism, she divides her time between Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada. She is working on a book of essays about Las Vegas titledFlamingo Road.
Review Quotes:
"My favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down. Gritty pointilism meets lyricism in this novel that reads like a spiritual how-to. How to rise above, how to survive, how to portray a life, and the complicated, neglectful people in that life, with magnanimity and honesty." --Heidi Julavits
"Jan Kerouac'sBaby Driveris a clear-eyed corrective to her father's ecstatic hooey inOn the Road.These far grimmer adventures on a far darker road lead to a tentatively hopeful homecoming-but the real upbeat ending is this book's very existence." --David Gates
"Lush, melodic, and unsentimentally genial,Baby Driverplunges fearlessly into feeling and experience, so beatific in the freshness of its perception that it makes even the most mythologized period of American culture feel new." --Ariana Reines
"[Baby Driver's] republication now feels like a gift -- possibly this year's most important literary salvage mission.Baby Driveris a potent and subversive cultural document, detailing a life that runs almost exactly parallel to the author's own . . . Kerouac's prose is honest and rough, take it or leave it. She tastes life at first hand. Who was it who wrote that ships are safest in harbor, but harbor isn't what ships are made for?" --Dwight Garner,The New York Times
"A tour de force of vagabond lit. In terms of sheer style and radical adventuring, Jan Kerouac gives her father, whom she calls 'the famous wino, ' a run for his money. Very rarely does a true free spirit capture their experience this vividly on the page." --Katie Roiphe
"[Baby Driver's] republication now feels like a gift -- possibly this year's most important literary salvage mission.Baby Driveris a potent and subversive cultural document, detailing a life that runs almost exactly parallel to the author's own . . . Kerouac's prose is honest and rough, take it or leave it. She tastes life at first hand. Who was it who wrote that ships are safest in harbor, but harbor isn't what ships are made for?" --Dwight Garner,The New York Times
"If [Jack] Kerouac sometimes put a spiritual gloss on poverty and life on the edge, his daughter offered an unflinching vision." --The Guardian
"By this imitative magic, Jan Kerouac hopes to move in the company of her father--not, I think, to rival him in letters, but to bring him back." --Carolyn See,Los Angeles Times
"A full-fledged writer on the brink, nearly mad, in search of something she still has yet to name.... In spite of her pain, Kerouac is obsessed with the need to look, to experience, to pierce beyond the surface and understand all that flashes there.... Kerouac writes in a style that is vivid, absorbing, unpretentious. She steers clear of vain and maudlin tones by attacking her ordeals with honesty and clarity." --San Francisco Examiner
"What's rolled out in this 'autobiographical novel' is Jan's childhood on the Lower East Side with gritty, hard-pressed mom Joan, and then her fast track into the 1960s demimonde: drugs, petty theft, drugs, Bellevue, drugs, juvenile detention centers, drugs. An older Jan in her twenties is also aired: commune life in New Mexico; working as a hooker; being a heroin-shooter; peyote session; a South American odyssey in the company of a scary psychopath." --Publishers Weekly
"There is also something endearing and brave about her frenetic, passionate capacity for experience.... Kerouac is a sharp observer (especially of men, with whom she is particularly experienced). At her best, she can be funny, wise and occasionally poetic ... that's the sign of a good traveler, and the sign of a good writer about to travel, too: namely, the ability not simply to look, but to see, and to find mystery in small things as well as large ones." --Madamoiselle
Publisher Marketing:
The first novel by Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack--a thrilling work of autobiographical fiction that captures with inspired detail a life driven by adventure, drugs, far-flung travel, and like her father, a relentless quest for pure experience.
"If [Jack] Kerouac sometimes put a spiritual gloss on poverty and life on the edge, his daughter offered an unflinching vision." --The Guardian