American Smoke

January 13, 2014
This rewarding literary travelogue through the turf of Beat poets and novelists is a layered, shape-shifting homage to their edgy rhythms. English poet, novelist, and actor Sinclair (Downriver) combines history, memory, and travel in a dizzying mix that will leave the novice reader pawing through primary sources in order to sort out the map of their influence, culturally and geographically. Readers steeped in the works of Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Lowry, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder (among the many writers referenced in his kaleidoscopic recollections) will enjoy the jam-packed depictions of these “psychogeographic energy lines,” as Sinclair (b. 1943) leaps from Black Mountain College to Lowry’s damp beach shack in Vancouver to Ed Dorn’s L.A. living room where he rhapsodizes about the prowess of the soccer star Wayne Rooney on television. Unbound by narrative constraint, stuffed with personal recollections of interactions with his heroes, shifting between time frames without warning or clear intent, the book’s main flaw might be its overabundance of material. But there’s plenty of humor and a respect for his idols; his account of his second pilgrimage to William Burroughs’s home is particularly good. Of his quest, Sinclair concedes: “I’m not sure what I was searching for, but I think I may have found it.” Any reader with a fraction of Sinclair’s robust, relentless knowledge and enthusiasm will feel the same. Agent: John Berlyne, Zeno Agency.

February 15, 2014
An intrepid British writer takes to the road in search of the Beats. Poet, essayist, documentarian, filmmaker, editor and novelist Sinclair (Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics, 2012, etc.) first read the Beats in the 1960s, when he was a teenager in Dublin. Later, he discovered "how tribal and interconnected the American countercultural scene actually was: everybody met everybody....They feuded, fought, formed intense friendships, sulked for generations." To understand the texture and force of the Beats' community, Sinclair embarked on a journey, following in the peripatetic and woozy footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and assorted other writers and their friends, lovers, publishers and acolytes. With an eye for the telling vignette and a deft talent for the "rapid-sketched" portrait, Sinclair counters what he calls "Beat Generation revivalism [that] threatens to turn the whole circus into another Bloomsbury Group." In the seaside city of Gloucester, Mass., he picked up the trail of poet Charles Olson, a large man with an overpowering presence and "a rumbling voice thick with smoke, sweat dripping, black eyebrows emphatic." Ginsberg emerges as a kind of Ancient Mariner, "with his glittering eye, his gleaming cranium and shamanic red silk shirt," responding to questions with well-rehearsed anecdotes involving Olson, Burroughs, and even Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "in broad-brim jungle hat, is an audition for the granddad of Indiana Jones." Although drugs, alcohol and sex were the vices of choice for all the Beats, Sinclair notes a difference between those in New York ("peppery, competitive") and the "cooler cats" in California, who were drawn to Buddhism. "What mattered most to the Beats," Sinclair writes, "was the intensity of visionary experience." Melding reportage and memoir, this gossipy, idiosyncratic cultural history offers a fresh, unvarnished look at an eccentric, brash and dynamic cast of literary rebels.

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March 1, 2014

An avant-garde filmmaker and writer, Sinclair (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Encore Award for Downriver) is better known in the British Isles than the United States. A mix of memoir, travelog, and literary criticism, his latest work chronicles a pilgrimage to places made sacred by his literary heroes: Charles Olson's Gloucester; Jack Kerouac's Lowell, MA; Gregory Corso's New York; William Burroughs's Kansas; and Gary Snyder's Pacific Northwest, among others. Chapters are organized into five sections: Ocean, Fire, Smoke, Mountain, and Ash, reflecting an interest in alchemy as well as ecology. Sinclair ruminates on the writers and their works, their relationships and mutual influences, and their debts to earlier writers such as Herman Melville and Celine. While the book celebrates these literary figures, it has a greater purpose--to provide Sinclair with a springboard for self-exploration. As such, it reflects a wide range of his thoughts on literary politics, the rare book trade, filmmaking, magic, Malcolm Lowry, Roberto Bolano, and, somewhat incongruously, Nazi war criminal Albert Speer. VERDICT Full of digressions and less than oblivious allusions, Sinclair's style will limit his audience. However, readers who share his artistic and cultural contexts will find the book both engaging and enjoyable.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

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