Jack Kerouac : King of the Beats

Rating:
Summary: Too much judgement
Review: I thought this book was a very readable overview of Jack Kerouac's life. It helped me gain some kind of overview which I had found elusive reading Gerald Nicosia's more detailed book. However what marred the book for me was Miles's intrusive and over-bearing judgements. Surely it's better to present the facts and let them speak for themselves? In chapter 8 (just over half way through the book) he launches into a tirade ....'How can a man deny his own child?... Where was Kerouac when he should have been reading his daughter bedtime stories, sharing with her his love for words?...' and so on. Unfortunately once he's in this mode he doesn't let up. I appreciate the sentiment and it's difficult not to judge Kerouac harshly over this - but I felt Miles should have made more of an effort to understand his subject. I almost felt I leant more about Barry Miles than Kerouac in this section of the book and it's commendable that Miles feels so strongly about family loyalties but is that really the issue here?

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Bio-pic
Review: Miles does an incredible job of putting together the jaded intricate life of an insanely selfish man. Kerouac was an incredible writer, yes, because he scrounged off everyone around him to better his skill. Funny when our heros turn into humans and we begin to feel our own inspiration from it.

Rating:
Summary: A TARNISHED KING
Review: This biography is part of an unceasing flow of writings about Kerouac and about the Beat movement which he helped to inspire. Miles's book is valuable because it explains why people continue to read Kerouac and the beats and also focuses on the limitations of the movement, I think, through discussion of Kerouac as a person.

Kerouac was first and foremost a writer. Miles' book emphasizes this. It discusses virtually each of Kerouac's major works, and minor works as well, in the context of his life -- when, precisely, they were written, what they are about, and where each book fits, in Miles's usually well-considered opinion, in Kedrouac's work as a whole. Such writing is more the purview of literary criticism than biography but Miles does it well and it is needed in a consideration of Kerouac's life and work. He focuses on the spritual side of the beats, their quarrel with conformity, materialism, and repressed sexuality, and their emphasis on feeling and the expression of feeling. Miles properly places Kerouac in the romantic tradition of literature and within American Romanticism in particular as a follower, most immediately, of Thomas Wolfe.

Miles does not spare Kerouac the man, in a discussion that should discourage any tendendy to hero-worship or mystification. Kerouac was selfish and inconsiderate of others, adolescent at the core, unduly attached to his mother, on the far fringes of the American right (although he probably deserves to be praised for not adopting the hippie, ultra-left, anti United States attitude of his followers and colleagues), and lead a destructive life, to his own talents and to the lives of people who loved him and had a right to depend upon him, such as his daughter.

As a writer, Kerouac emerges in the book as a person of talent with a vision of American life that is valuable (though hardly unique, I think). He wrote well but too much and too carelessly and too much under the influence of drugs. He also, as Miles suggests was overly dogmatic and rigid in his use of spontaneous prose.

The beats were a unique literary movement and Kerouac was an integral part of it. His books, I think will continue to be read and valued not for the most part as literary masterpieces, but as expressing the mood of a generation. There is much in them that is worthwhile. Miles' portrait of Kerouac and his work is judicious. It also encourages the reader to explore Kerouac's writings for his or herself, which is the goal of any good biography or a writer.

Rating:
Summary: Unexpectedly compelling
Review: With Kerouac an industry these days, it is hard to imagine anything new being offered, particularly from a biographer who never (on the strength of this text) even met him.

Well stick with it. As a review on the back on my copy puts it "this is an excellent portrait of a ghastly man."

Barry Miles does not understate Kerouac's influence. He takes him seriously as a writer and stylist, despite the patchiness of his output. His importance, says Miles, lay in his popularising the break with American post-war conformity (On the Road) and his prophesizing a Zen-infused "world full of rucksack wanderers" (The Dharma Bums), which underpinned the more thoughtful end of hippiedom.

No doubt such things would have happened without Kerouac, or any of the beats, but this odd mother-lovin' alcoholic redneck from the small-town north-east undoubtedly flavoured the 60s and 70s and inspired countless thousands of wanderers and artists.

Barry Miles's contribution is to sort through the myth, delivering a freshness to a now largely stale story of genius, self-obsession, and fatal loathing. The accounts of the cold-water flats of 1940s New York are especially vivid, where the beat ethos - much rougher than its hippie godchild - was formed.

With so much sentimentalising of the Kerouac story, this is one for readers who've been moved by the man but want more than the literary postcard.