“My favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down. Gritty pointilism meets lyricism in this novel that reads like a spiritual how-to. How to rise above, how to survive, how to portray a life, and the complicated, neglectful people in that life, with magnanimity and honesty.” —Heidi Julavits
“Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver is a clear-eyed corrective to her father’s ecstatic hooey in On the Road. These far grimmer adventures on a far darker road lead to a tentatively hopeful homecoming–but the real upbeat ending is this book’s very existence.” —David Gates
“Lush, melodic, and unsentimentally genial, Baby Driver plunges fearlessly into feeling and experience, so beatific in the freshness of its perception that it makes even the most mythologized period of American culture feel new.” —Ariana Reines
“A tour de force of vagabond lit. In terms of sheer style and radical adventuring, Jan Kerouac gives her father, whom she calls ‘the famous wino,’ a run for his money. Very rarely does a true free spirit capture their experience this vividly on the page.” —Katie Roiphe
“[Baby Driver’s] republication now feels like a gift — possibly this year’s most important literary salvage mission. Baby Driver is a potent and subversive cultural document, detailing a life that runs almost exactly parallel to the author’s own . . . Kerouac’s prose is honest and rough, take it or leave it. She tastes life at first hand. Who was it who wrote that ships are safest in harbor, but harbor isn’t what ships are made for?” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“If [Jack] Kerouac sometimes put a spiritual gloss on poverty and life on the edge, his daughter offered an unflinching vision.” —The Guardian
“By this imitative magic, Jan Kerouac hopes to move in the company of her father—not, I think, to rival him in letters, but to bring him back.” —Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times
“A full-fledged writer on the brink, nearly mad, in search of something she still has yet to name…. In spite of her pain, Kerouac is obsessed with the need to look, to experience, to pierce beyond the surface and understand all that flashes there…. Kerouac writes in a style that is vivid, absorbing, unpretentious. She steers clear of vain and maudlin tones by attacking her ordeals with honesty and clarity.” —San Francisco Examiner
“What’s rolled out in this ‘autobiographical novel’ is Jan’s childhood on the Lower East Side with gritty, hard-pressed mom Joan, and then her fast track into the 1960s demimonde: drugs, petty theft, drugs, Bellevue, drugs, juvenile detention centers, drugs. An older Jan in her twenties is also aired: commune life in New Mexico; working as a hooker; being a heroin-shooter; peyote session; a South American odyssey in the company of a scary psychopath.” —Publishers Weekly
“There is also something endearing and brave about her frenetic, passionate capacity for experience…. Kerouac is a sharp observer (especially of men, with whom she is particularly experienced). At her best, she can be funny, wise and occasionally poetic … that’s the sign of a good traveler, and the sign of a good writer about to travel, too: namely, the ability not simply to look, but to see, and to find mystery in small things as well as large ones.” —Madamoiselle
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