Jack Kerouac

With the arrival of the second volume in Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's series of "Album Biographies," it's harder than ever to discern a rationale for this quasi-academic project. Ross Macdonald (p. 74), by series editor Matthew J. Bruccoli, suggested that the subjects might be writers not usually given substantial literary treatment. Now, however, comes a flat, routine mini-biography of Jack Kerouac, whose life and work have been reported and analyzed in an avalanche of recent print - some of it distinguished. Clark (The World of Damon Runyon) adds little new material and offers no particular viewpoint on the Kerouac canon - which is defended against "snobbish" critics, treated with vague reverence, and given only occasional, hackneyed critical focus. ("The first-person prose of this novel achieves a unified sound like a great bop solo.") Kerouac's early life is sketched in with some emphasis on crucial shaping forces: the childhood death of his brother; his "Canuck" background; his father's bitter failures. But once Jack begins his vagabond "Beat" years - the Ginsberg/Burroughs circle, the alcoholism, the male-bonding obsessions, the writing experiments, the publishing frustrations, the fatal fame - Clark's narrative becomes thin, linear, and merely depressing, with the psychological mayhem largely reduced to dank gossip. Too superficial for involvement or insight, too detail-clotted for a satisfying short-take: an unnecessary addition to the already-crowded Kerouac-studies shelf - which, with the bewildering exception of Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters (absent from the bibliography here), Clark draws on extensively, unimaginatively. (Kirkus Reviews)