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A review of Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming-Of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac

by Joyce Johnson

A moving memoir of New York, Kerouac, and Men and Women in the 1950‘s

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming-Of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac What if, through a series of unforeseeable chance occurrences, you come to love a man who changes the course of literary history, who is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century? Joyce Johnson has written a moving memoir of her love affair with Jack Kerouac. I chose to read it not because I'm particularly intrigued by the Beat Generation, but because I'm looking into good memoir writing. If you'd like to explore how a perceptive writer writes about emotions and experiences, check this book out.

A personal story is, of course, grounded in a certain time. Joyce Johnson (née Glassmann) was born to a staid and quiet Jewish couple on New York's Upper West Side. She took real delight in her clandestine discovery of the risqué writers' and artists' and jazz culture down in the Village at the age of 13. "I'd hang out around the edges of the crowded tables, listening, looking, not really participating. Ideas flashed by like silver freight trains that wouldn't stop at your station to unload but had to push on to a vanishing point in the distance. What was Jungian? Existentialist? Abstract expressionist?" We also learn a bit about what happened to her afterwards: love and loss, motherhood and friendship, reading, editing and writing.

A passage on how grammar was taught in the schools of the 1950's immediately conveys a feeling for the restricting corsets of convention of the time. One teacher "has particular scorn for sentence fragments, which she says ‘can only be used for effect.' So as not to confuse us, no writers who break such rules are ever named. ... Effect is something we girls have no right to. Only after years of laboriously equipping each sentence with subject and predicate, as with boots and umbrella, can we hope to earn it. Perhaps not even then." Good girls write complete sentences. And they wear skirt-and-sweater sets.

Joyce and Jack were a couple on and off between 1957 and 1959. Women may have been muses for the men of the Beat Generation, but more often they were thought of as inexorable pulls towards "fatal" domesticity (fatal to art, that is). It was assumed that men's experience is more authentic, counts more – but then, they were free to experiment and travel. And the women themselves felt they had no choice but to succumb to the mystique: "... in the ripening atmosphere of some midnight or endless beery afternoon came the moment when the absolutely right and perfect, irreducibly masculine thing was said or demonstrated unforgettably ..."

"I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves. They seemed to believe they had a mission in life, from which they could easily be deflected by being exposed to too much emotions." Talking to my seventeen-year old niece, I think times have changed: boys and girls feel equally free to – or even compelled to – explore sexuality; they are equally on the lookout for love or the sparks of attraction – and equally confused by adolescent torrents of emotion. Roles are less fixed.

Anyone looking to better understand the relations between men and women fifty years ago will learn a lot from this book.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming-Of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
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-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
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