At the End of the Road

September 22, 2014
Building on his previous work about the Beats’ time south of the border, García-Robles (The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico) delivers a fast-paced, highly editorialized version of Kerouac’s handful of trips to Mexico. The narrative, scraped together out of the many literary snippets the writer (and his friends) left behind, follows the time line of Kerouac’s intermittent visits, made between 1950 and 1961. With such a wealth of literature concerning Kerouac already in existence, García-Robles doesn’t concentrate on revisiting the facts. Instead, he uses quotes from Kerouac’s fiction to trace his subject’s inner life and place Mexico within the larger context of the famed novelist’s artistic evolution. At times, he even seems to take up the voice of Mexico itself, speaking to the uninformed American traveler. In the end, the book complicates the vision Kerouac presented in On the Road and other books. “ experienced yet another Mexican epiphany: It ‘was one of the great mystic rippling moments of my life—I saw right then that Enrique was great and that the Indian, the Mexican is great, straight, simple and perfect.’ Dream on, Jackie.”

November 15, 2014

Garcia-Robles (The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico) here turns his attention to Burroughs's protege Jack Kerouac (1922-69). Drawing heavily on Kerouac's writings and correspondence, his aim is to analyze the role Mexico played in the Beat novelist's life and work. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver what its title promises. Too much material is devoted to general biography and a rehash of Beat lore that has been covered better and in more detail in earlier works, including Ann Charter's Kerouac: A Biography, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe, and Barry Miles's Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats. The style of the volume is popular rather than scholarly, a little surprising in a work issued by a university press. The narrative is fast paced and lively; the prose occasionally adorned with overblown figurative language, as is the case in which Kerouac is described as being "hung over as a used syringe." Garcia-Robles sometimes places himself inside the writer's head; at other times he addresses him in asides, e.g., "Some getaway, Jack." VERDICT Given the book's heavy reliance on summary and paraphrase, it seems to be addressed more to casual readers of Kerouac rather than scholars. The influence of Mexico on Kerouac--and a host of other Beat writers--is fertile ground for research, but while the author's general ideas on Kerouac's complex relationship with Mexico are on target, they require more in-depth development.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.