Minor characters

Johnson's 1987 NBCC Award- winning memoir of the 1950s and her relationship with Kerouac and other beats features a new introduction by the author. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Ironically, though the raison d'être of this memoir is presumably Johnson's 1957-59 affair with Jack Kerouac, the pages on Kerouac are the least impressive or affecting ones here. Novelist Johnson (neÉ Joyce Glassman) is best in her early-'50s, pre-Kerouac days--when, as a middle-class-Jewish teenager from Manhattan's Upper West Side, she started exploring the bohemian world down around Washington Square. With older-looking pal Mafia, she hung around the Waldorf Cafeteria--donning long copper earrings, fleeing from a blind-date with an ex-con (""It's not that he isn't handsome, it's just that you can't help feeling his face has sort of died""), learning strange new words, trying out her sexual fantasies on the typewriter. (In a vignette worthy of Philip Roth, Joyce's parents, after sneaking a look at her writing, over-react. . . to put it mildly.) And, though Johnson's familiar sexual crises are less than fresh (the ""Was this all there was?"" deflowering, faking orgasm, a tacky abortion), there's a strong thread through her years at Barnard--in the story of doomed friend Elise, a fat girl who slavishly loved a young married professor (he later moved on to Joyce and others) and then, equally hopelessly, poet Allan Ginsberg. . . who had just decided to give up attempts at consistent heterosexuality. When Elise's Ginsberg relationship leads Joyce (now working in publishing) to a meeting with the near-legendary Jack, however, Johnson's narrative loses much of its edge and momentum: her prose strains for eloquence (""I see the blue, bruised eye of Kerouac and construe his melancholy as the look of a man needing love because I'm, among other things, twenty-one years old""); in chronicling the rather dour, off-and-on affair, she seems torn between minute documentation (miffed, it seems, about the trivializing treatment in all those Kerouac bios) and a more selective, shrewd approach. And finally, despite some attempts at analyzing both herself and mother-dominated Jack (""that confusing distance in him that was both paternal and rejecting""), Johnson never quite brings depth or fire to the romance. Still, Kerouac-watchers will want to have Johnson's firsthand views--especially the close-up of Jack's reaction to the On the Road celebrity explosion. (They read the first reviews together.) And, as a montage of 1950s Village life, with Mr. and Mrs. LeRoi Jones and Franz Kline and others passing through, this is almost always evocative, frequently quite touching. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.