The Voice Is All

Starred review from July 9, 2012
An intimate of Kerouac who has chronicled his life and the beat culture (including in her award-winning 1983 memoir, Minor Characters), Johnson brings an insider’s perspective to this insightful study of how Kerouac found his literary voice. Delving into his formative years, she paints a portrait of the artist as a sensitive young man, haunted from age four by the death of his older brother, Gerard, and hampered by his family’s frequent moves. In her most novel analysis, Johnson asserts that growing up speaking joual in his insular French-Canadian household fostered an unwieldy internal translation process whereby Kerouac “had to figure out how to capture his ‘simultaneous impressions’ in English.” Kerouac’s voracious reading of Thomas Wolfe, Dostoyevski, and Céline; restless travels; drinking and drug use; prolific writing and revising; and socializing with fellow beats—especially Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, and Neal Cassady—kept him striving to express “‘the big rushing tremendousness in me and all poets.’” In unsparing detail, Johnson depicts Kerouac’s contradictions and self-destructive tendencies, and the recklessness of certain relationships that impeded as much as they facilitated the discovery of his true voice. Johnson excels in her colorful, candid assessment of the evolution of this voice—up through the genesis of On the Road—the point where most other appraisals of Kerouac begin. Agent: Irene Skolnick, Irene Skolnick Literary Agency.

Starred review from August 15, 2012
An exemplary biography of the Beat icon and his development as a writer. With unprecedented access to the New York Public Library's extensive Berg Collection of Kerouac artifacts, Johnson (Missing Men, 2005, etc.) tells the familiar story of the rise of the reluctant "king of the Beats" through the unfamiliar lens of his notebooks, manuscripts and correspondence with family, friends, lovers, editors and writers. The collection was unavailable to scholars for three decades, and access to it is still tightly controlled by the Kerouac estate. Johnson uses her opportunity as a pioneer in this new era of Kerouac scholarship to turn a laser-sharp focus on Kerouac's evolving ideas about language, fiction vs. truth and the role of the writer in his time. She ends her chronology in late 1951, as Kerouac found the voice and method he'd employ for the rest of his brief career while seeking a publisher for On the Road and working on the novel he considered his masterpiece, Visions of Cody. While still detailing the chaotic and occasionally tragic events of the writer's life--from mill-town football hero to multiply divorced dipsomaniac mama's boy/cult idol--Johnson's focus allows her to trace a trajectory of success rather than follow his painfully familiar decline into alcoholism and premature death. "[T]o me," she writes, "what is important is Jack's triumph in arriving at the voice that matched his vision." Of perhaps most interest was her discovery of just how important his French-Canadian heritage was to Kerouac's sense of identity. He considered its earthy patois his native language and seems to have translated his thoughts from it into the muscular English with which he's associated. There's plenty of life in these pages to fascinate casual readers, and Johnson is a sensitive but admirably objective biographer. A triumph of scholarship.

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April 1, 2012

Aspiring novelist Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date nine months before On the Road was published. Minor Characters, her National Book Critics Circle Award winner, detailed their relationship. Here Johnson considers how Kerouac's French Canadian background influenced his work. For literati everywhere.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2012
Johnson chronicled her indelible relationship with the author of On the Road in her acclaimed memoir, Minor Characters (1983). She now proves herself to be a rigorous, knowledgeable, and penetrating biographer in this engrossing portrait of Kerouac as a divided soul. Johnson investigates the consequences of the childhood death of his older brother and Kerouac's compensatory entanglement with his mother and his suspension between Franco-American and New England cultures and the French Canadian dialect joual and English. Kerouac's survivor's guilt and never feeling wholly American, Johnson argues, were catalysts for his spiritual quest, hunger for books, and need to write. She offers exceptionally lucid coverage of his depression, alcoholism, and every significant relationship in his surging life, including his now legendary friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. But most valuable is Johnson's discerning analysis of what Kerouac hoped to achieve in his by-turns exalted and anguished transmutation of experience into literature asdrawing inspiration from Thomas Wolfe, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and jazzhe created his alter ego, Jack Duluoz, and devoted himself to the grand and demanding vision of writing the saga of his own life as it unfolded. Johnson ends her intricately revelatory biography just before she and Kerouac met in 1957, leaving readers wanting more of her insights into this revolutionary writer for whom work was everything. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)