Baby Driver
The most sharply realized of [Jan's] books ... Its republication now feels like a gift — possibly this year’s most important literary salvage mission ... A potent and subversive cultural document, detailing a life that runs almost exactly parallel to the author’s own ... Amanda Fortini [provides a] sensitive and lively introduction ... Fearless and fly-specked ... The realities of the narrator’s life hit doubly hard because the experience is seemingly unmediated ... Her prose is nothing like her father’s, though it occasionally has a bounce that can resemble his ... I consistently wished this book, which at its best reminded me of Lucia Berlin’s fiction, were 10 percent shrewder. Some magic ingredient is, just barely, missing. But Kerouac’s prose is honest and rough, take it or leave it
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[Jack Kerouac's] absence — and the complex range of emotions it triggers in Jan and Joan — engenders the powerful farrago of yearning, loss, and restlessness that defines Jan’s life, yet remains implicit, addressed only indirectly for much of the narrative ... Her account of her earliest memories evokes the wonder and sensitivity of that time, especially its vivid dreams ... Jan’s description of her father is detailed ... Readers expecting Jan to be a Jack imitator will be disappointed. Although there are broad similarities of theme and motif...Jan is her own writer and arguably a better one than her father often was. She has a knack for pithy understatement ... Abounds with...Jan’s eye for detail, her deadpan tone, her ability to evoke a wealth of images, associations, and feelings—to evoke an era—with only a few words ... Jan’s narrating persona is also notable for empathy ... A very good book, but it is a difficult one to read ... She manages to transmute that tempestuous life into a work of art and thus also the apparently directionless into something beautiful and meaningful.
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A startlingly original example of the modern road-trip chronicle ... A jagged excursion into an underworld the elder Kerouac only skirted ... A picaresque novel, and possibly the truest example we have of what I would call the female picaresque ... Readers may look for, and find, in Baby Driver echoes of familiar Beat themes, but the book’s dark music is all her own ... Her writing is intensely visual; she has a poet’s gift for distilling language into odd, arresting imagery ... Has a desperate, improvisational momentum ... The force of Jan’s personality and her pragmatic survivor’s energy keep the novel from falling into fragments ... Kerouac also attends to small, sensory details ... The remarkable triumph of Baby Driver is its stubborn resistance to self-pity.
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