Visions of Kerouac

Dennis Denisoff teaches English at McGill University and is the author
of Dog Years.

McGoogan knows his Kerouac. All the popular sites, famous images, and
semi-mythic claims of excess are mentioned, as are the various addresses
at which the Beat writer lived, the streets he walked on, the bars he
drank at, the drinks he drank, the drunks he drank his drinks with. It
is clear the author has done his research, and some academics will
probably find his list of information sources useful. Indeed, anybody
who is a major fan of Jack Kerouac will enjoy this novel immensely.
Others may find it less fulfilling.

The basic story line involves an insufferable egotist (“I’m
eighteen years old, tall, dark and intense. Yes, and handsome, too, why
not declare it? ... In high school I’d been an athlete”) who is
blindly devoted to the romance of an alcoholic male journey. Growing up,
for this character, means hittin’ the bottle and hittin’ the road,
goin’ out to the West Coast for some adventure. The entire
bildungsroman is woven around the metaphor of a masculine road trip that
is supposed to echo Kerouac’s, which is itself supposed to echo the
one taken by James Joyce’s Ulysses, because, according to the
narrator, Joyce is “the father of us all.” There is, of course, a
bonding scene between the protagonist and his real father, who comes to
rescue his son. The mother remains at home crying into the telephone.

The novel is packed with men making embarrassing efforts to show love,
and there is more than one scene in which the men turn to wrestling to
express their mutual affection. These men, when not
“Kerouac-wrestling” or grasping at straws of profundity, are trying
to get money out of each other. Sometimes they drink, and that makes
them laugh. Sometimes they try not to drink, and that makes them
introspective. Like the protagonist’s mother, the other
two-dimensional female characters in this novel are there primarily to
be described and discussed.

The themes and style of McGoogan’s Visions of Kerouac are clearly
supposed to connote works by Kerouac such as On the Road and Dharma
Bums. Unfortunately, McGoogan’s style is far inferior to Kerouac’s,
and when McGoogan attempts to replicate the stream-of-consciousness
style, the contrived narrative exposes the artifice.