Introduction by Amanda Fortini Outsider Classics is Dead Ink's resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcast. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the margins and away from the mainstream. "Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in ...
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Introduction by Amanda Fortini Outsider Classics is Dead Ink's resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcast. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the margins and away from the mainstream. "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. Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac, published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Unacknowledged by her father, she is haunted by the absence of his love. With a graceful, sometimes disturbing detachment and intense lyricism, she explores the freewheeling soul of a woman on her own road. From an adolescence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan dropping LSD and doing time in detention homes, to the peace movement in Haight-Ashbury and Washington state, to traveling by bus through Central America with a madman for a lover, Jan lives by her wits and whims, rhapsodic and irrepressible.
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Jan Kerouac (1952 -- 1996) was the child of the famous beat writer Jack Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty. Jan was born when the couple had already separated and divorced. Jack Kerouac denied paternity until his fatherhood was proven when Jan was nine through a blood test. He had little contact with his daughter, and saw her only twice in her life. Joan Haverty was left to raise Jan alone.
In 1981, Jan Kerouac published an autobiographical novel "Baby Driver" about the early years of her life. Two more novels would follow. "Baby Driver" received little attention and was long out of print. Fortunately, "Baby Driver" has just been reissued by New York Review Books Classics. It is valuable and deserves to be read. Amanda Fortini wrote an insightful Introduction to the reissue which describes "Baby Driver" as "at its core a picaresque novel, and possibly the truest example we have of what I would call the female picaresque."
The story is narrated in the first person by Jan Kerouac. It begins when, just before turning 16, she is pregnant and living in rural Mexico with her husband, John, and gives birth to a stillborn child from another man. The novel then describes Jan's life in New York City with her mother and with three siblings from her mother's relationship from a marriage following her marriage to Kerouac. These chapters alternate with chapters describing Jan's life on her own, from the time in Mexico with John through a series of wild adventures that take her through Washington State, San Francisco, the American Soutwest, Mexico, and South America.
The most memorable scenes in the book are those set in Manhattan's Lower East side during its declining days in the 1960s. Jan Kerouac describes a life of poverty in the tenements and the streets and the diversity of the residents at the time of this fabled area. Jan led a troubled life, moving in and out of reform schools and juvenile prisons as she became involved with theft, drugs, alcohol, and older men. She also cut a record, age 12 in 1964 as part of a short-lived girl group called the Whippets. These sections of the book show a gritty picture of Jan Kerouac as a troubled, delinquent girl and of her relationship to her mother.
The alternating chapters of the book show Jan Kerouac living the life of a vagabond and a wanderer, never staying in the same place for long. She drifts and goes from one man to another, often at great risk to her life. She is heavily involved with drugs and works a series of odd jobs to get by. Most notably, she works extensively as a prostitute and exotic dancer. She travels and takes a lengthy trip to Peru in the company of a psychotic before returning to Washington State and her mother and to reconciliation and an uncertain future.
The book is written in short scenes. The writing is heavily descriptive with a great deal of detail and particularity combined with metaphor. It is often effective and striking but occasionally bogs down. The reader wants to root for her as she goes through her troubled life. Jan meets her famous father only twice in the book and also has a phone call or two with him. Late in the book, when she is institutionalized in the Bronx, her doctor discovers she is Jack Kerouac's daughter and brings her a copy of "On the Road" to read. Jan writes: "I read it all in one night instead of ringing for a Seconal. And I was happy to know that my father's thought patterns were so similar to mine. Also now that I had a picture of what he had been doing all this time, all over the country, it made more sense that he hadn't had the time to be fatherly."
Jan Kerouac's wanderings were much harsher and more dangerous that the wanderings Jack Kerouac romanticzed and spiritualized in "On the Road" and other writings. As Fortini writes in her Introduction, "Baby Driver" is instead " a jagged excursion into an underworld the elder Kerouac only skirted." Fortini writes that Jan's novel shares certain themes with the works of her father including "restless journeying, experimental prose, rejection of traditional or materialist values, and a commitment to freedom and spontaneity as vital principles of life and art."
"Baby Driver" is moving and difficult. There is little in the book of social criticism or of criticism of others or oneself. Instead, the book shows a young woman engaged with her own experiences and under difficult circumstances trying to enjoy and to live her life. As Fortini writes, Jan Kerouac "refuses to play the victim, even when it seems plainly justified. She writes without bitterness or blame, either refusing resentment or immune to it. She owns her experiences, decisions, and flaws, without reservation. Fate sent Jan Kerouac down a difficult road, but she travelled it as if she'd chosen it."
New York Review Books has done a service by reissuing "Baby Driver".
