{"id":171988,"date":"2025-10-24T10:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T14:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171988"},"modified":"2025-10-23T17:44:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T21:44:50","slug":"the-female-picaresque-jan-kerouacs-baby-driver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/10\/24\/the-female-picaresque-jan-kerouacs-baby-driver\/","title":{"rendered":"The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac\u2019s Baby Driver<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jan Kerouac in Eugene, Oregon, 1983. Photograph by D. Alexander Stuart, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby<\/em> Driver<\/em>, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, Jan Kerouac calls herself \u201ca gum wrapper in a whirlwind.\u201d In this moment, Kerouac has just decided to move from Santa Fe, where she\u2019s been sleeping with local politicians for money, to work as an escort at a poolside men\u2019s club in Phoenix. It\u2019s one impulsive decision in a long string of them, and although the remark seems tossed off and casual, it perfectly captures the whole chaotic course of her wayward existence.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, the gig goes awry. The police raid the club for prostitution, and the owners are forced to reconstitute as a \u201cmassage parlor\u201d in a trailer outside of town. Kerouac soon grows weary of the work, for which she consumes an obliterating combination of wine, soda, and \u201cbennies\u201d to produce \u201ca loose capable vigor just made to order for the job,\u201d as she winkingly puts it. She makes a snap decision to get back on the highway, leaving as hastily as she arrived: \u201cBounding along, flashing past saguaros in my silver Caddy, serenaded by Willie Nelson wailing in the desert air \u2026 never felt so free,\u201d she writes. \u201cI had $800 and I was going back to Santa Fe. \u2026 I was like Marco Polo bringing wondrous bounty to amaze the folks back home.\u201d<\/p>\n

With her invocation of Marco Polo, the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer who wrote the best-selling Travels of Marco Polo<\/em>, Kerouac asserts her place in a men\u2019s club of a different sort. Baby Driver<\/em> is a startlingly original example of the modern road-trip chronicle\u2014a genre traditionally associated with men, and with one man in particular: her father, Jack Kerouac, the writer-adventurer renowned for On the Road<\/em> (1957), his own autobiographical novel about traveling across America.<\/p>\n

Baby Driver<\/em> is not an exploration of their relationship, as one might expect. Although Kerouac was known the world over, he was barely known to his daughter. Jan Kerouac met her father in person only twice; he died in 1969, when she was just seventeen. The book is instead a jagged excursion into an underworld the elder Kerouac only skirted. Jan lived, not entirely by choice, the kind of hardscrabble life her father contrived for literary reasons. Still, one sees in her novel certain aspects of his best-known works, chiefly their restless journeying, experimental prose, rejection of traditional or materialist values, and a commitment to freedom and spontaneity as vital principles of life and art. Baby Driver<\/em> is at its core a picaresque novel, and possibly the truest example we have of what I would call the female picaresque.<\/p>\n

In a picaresque novel, the hero rambles around having adventures\u2014or, perhaps more accurately, misadventures\u2014often of a sexual or romantic sort. He or she (but usually he) tends to be fatherless, of modest origins, a rascal, an outsider living by his wits. While there\u2019s a robust pantheon of roguish wanderers in Western literature\u2014Don Quixote; Tom Jones; Huckleberry Finn; Augie March; Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s alter ego, Raoul Duke; and Jack Kerouac\u2019s Sal Paradise, as well as that character\u2019s sidekick, Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady), all spring to mind\u2014there isn\u2019t an equivalent deep bench when it comes to female picaresque heroines. The historical reasons for this are obvious. Until at least the sixties, women weren\u2019t free to travel around alone, and they faced social condemnation if they did. A novel about a fictional female drifter pitching from escapade to escapade would have been neither likely nor believable. As Joyce Johnson drily puts it in Minor Characters: A Young Woman\u2019s Coming-of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac<\/em>, \u201cYoung women found the pursuit of freedom much more complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an essay I wrote on the topic nearly a decade ago, I named a few of my favorite female picaresques, like Erica Jong\u2019s Fear of Flying<\/em> and Angela Carter\u2019s Nights at the Circus<\/em>, noting that memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert\u2019s Eat, Pray, Love<\/em> and Cheryl Strayed\u2019s Wild<\/em> were contemporary successors to these books. But I neglected to mention Baby Driver<\/em>, arguably the most honest, gutsy, and quietly heroic novel belonging to the genre, because I had never heard of it. I didn\u2019t even know Jack Kerouac had a daughter.<\/p>\n

Though her work has received some interest over the years from scholars and Kerouac enthusiasts alike, Jan Kerouac\u2019s life and writing have for the most part been relegated to a footnote in her father\u2019s biography. Her mother, Joan Haverty, was Jack Kerouac\u2019s second wife; they lived together for a mere eight months, notably during the frenzied three-week period in April 1951 when he typed, on a hundred-and-twenty-foot-long scroll of taped-together tracing paper, the first-draft manuscript of On the Road<\/em>. Joan, who appears as \u201cLaura\u201d in the novel, worked as a waitress to support him. Upon learning she was pregnant, Kerouac asked her to get an abortion\u2014illegal at the time\u2014but she refused. On February 16, 1952, Jan was born.<\/p>\n

Kerouac never publicly acknowledged his only child. It is said that this was to protect his devoutly Catholic mother, Gabrielle\u2014always the central female figure in his life\u2014who wouldn\u2019t have tolerated the idea of him leaving a pregnant Joan. But a court-ordered paternity test he took in 1961, when Jan was nine and a half years old, proved she was his, as if their uncanny physical resemblance wasn\u2019t evidence enough. After one child-support hearing, Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg, saying Joan \u201cshowed me pixes of the dotter who I think looks like me \u2026 so may be mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gerald Nicosia, one of Kerouac\u2019s biographers and the editor of Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory<\/em> (2009), contends that \u201cboth her life and work, indeed her very existence,\u201d are \u201cbeing systematically erased from literary history.\u201d Whether this alleged erasure is due to the shrouded circumstances of her paternity, or arose as a penalty for having tangled with her late father\u2019s estate, it\u2019s impossible to say. What is clear is that Jan Kerouac\u2019s obscurity is undeserved. Although Baby<\/em> Driver<\/em> (1981) has long been out of print, as has her second autobiographical novel, Train Song<\/em> (1988)\u2014her third, Parrot Fever<\/em>, was unfinished when she died of kidney failure in 1996, at only forty-four years old\u2014the book begs for rediscovery. Readers may look for, and find, in Baby Driver<\/em> echoes of familiar Beat themes, but the book\u2019s dark music is all her own.<\/p>\n

Baby Driver<\/em> hews closely to the facts of Jan Kerouac\u2019s turbulent life, so one can only guess what liberties she took that make it fiction. Today, we would call it autofiction. (The title comes from the 1969 Paul Simon song of the same name\u2014whose lyrics provide the book\u2019s epigraph\u2014and the book bears no relation to the 2017 movie.) The novel opens in Yelapa, Mexico, where Kerouac, fifteen, pregnant, and on probation from a reformatory, has run away from New York City to avoid being sent to a home for unwed mothers. \u201cI patted the turquoise cloth draped over my seven-month belly,\u201d she writes, \u201cfeeling the baby move within, revolving now like a restless planet.\u201d Her writing is intensely visual; she has a poet\u2019s gift for distilling language into odd, arresting imagery. \u201cThis hard compact ball was comforting\u2014a rubber bumper to protect me from the world.\u201d The baby is stillborn, and although the stoic Kerouac wastes little time on self-analysis, the trauma shadows her aimless, incessant wandering that follows.<\/p>\n

To call her a rolling stone would be an understatement. She makes her way up the West Coast to Kittitas, Washington, with her then husband, John. They live next door to her mother, Joan, and Kerouac works at a health food store \u201camid shining ranks of juice bottles and bins of powdered yeast.\u201d After three years of \u201ccuddly lukewarm\u201d marriage, she lights out alone for Santa Fe, where she has a series of misbegotten romantic affairs, descends into alcohol and heroin addiction, and dabbles in prostitution. She travels through Central and South America, eventually ending up in the Peruvian jungle with a psychotic lover from whom she has to plot a cunning escape. The chapters chronicling her rootless adult years alternate with those that tunnel back into her feral childhood on New York City\u2019s Lower East Side. There, she lives in various crumbling tenements with her flaky yet determined mother and three younger half-siblings. When she is only twelve years old, a man in his early twenties introduces her to LSD. In no time, she loses interest in school, stops attending, grows increasingly defiant, and is committed to Bellevue by her mother. She spends the rest of her early teen years in and out of juvenile detention homes.<\/p>\n

The novel is a series of vignettes, some clipped and strobe-like, others more drawn out. Baby Driver<\/em>\u2019s supporting characters\u2014its paramours, roommates, female friends, drug buddies\u2014make rapid entrances and exits, rarely hanging around for more than a few pages. Places change just as quickly as Kerouac moves from one shoddy dwelling to the next. An adobe house in Santa Fe looks \u201clike a lopsided ceramic kindergarten project.\u201d In another \u201cmoldy crackerbox house,\u201d she cocoons herself in a pair of fluffy pink comforters and rides out her \u201cheavy junk fog\u201d under a red light\u2019s reassuring glow. For a while, she lives in her car, \u201csleeping in a bundle of wreckage in the back seat.\u201d She calls it \u201cthe shabbiest house I\u2019d ever lived in.\u201d To avoid staying there, she tells us, she floats among one-night stands. Baby Driver<\/em> has a desperate, improvisational momentum. Kerouac just doesn\u2019t give up.<\/p>\n

She survives by working the oddest of odd jobs: encyclopedia salesperson, movie extra, go-go dancer, racetrack stable hand. These flash by because the jobs themselves are transient, much like her relationships. One critic griped that her \u201cautobiography is one of constant directionless movement, compressing more elements into this one book than her father lived in ten!\u201d But such was the reality of her poor, itinerant existence. The force of Jan\u2019s personality and her pragmatic survivor\u2019s energy keep the novel from falling into fragments. And of course, the very essence of the picaresque is its pell-mell tumbling quality. As William S. Burroughs said in a 1974 interview, with all the swaggering self-assurance of a famous male writer: \u201cI myself am in a very old tradition, namely, that of the picaresque novel. People complain that my novels have no plot. Well, a picaresque novel has no plot. It is simply a series of incidents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baby Driver<\/em> teems with incidents, but Kerouac also attends to small, sensory details. She writes of \u201cflying metallically on the swings\u201d as a child, sums up a love affair as \u201ca whirl of adolescent flavors,\u201d and describes go-go dancing at a billiards bar \u201camid heavy beerscent.\u201d She\u2019s a master of the close-up\u2014there\u2019s not an uninteresting description in the book\u2014and her knack for defamiliarization animates the chapters about her childhood especially. She describes her Lower East Side grade school as having \u201cenormous cruel hallways that seemed designed to terrify,\u201d with \u201csickening green paint and gruesome wire caging between stairways\u201d that \u201calways made the whole place look like a transparent insect\u2019s digestive tract, the kids going up and down its food.\u201d Her writing often has the off-kilter, uncanny clarity of outsider art, untainted by consensus perceptions, and her visceral language is strikingly effective at conveying the squalor of tenement-slum life. The ancient radiators, \u201ccrouched ornately, hissing and popping and leaking by the cold soot-silled windows.\u201d The noise of the manhole cover jostled by cars that forms the \u201cheartbeat of the street.\u201d Her tough, beleaguered mother \u201cstepping from milk crate to milk crate over a foot-deep sea of sewage on the kitchen floor, frying Italian sausages for dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drugs offered a way to escape or enchant her dispiriting circumstances. Of an LSD trip, she writes, \u201cI heard water dripping in paradisical tones somewhere\u2014most likely from the leaky kitchen faucet\u2014but it sounded to me like primeval droplets in the Garden of Eden.\u201d Her prose has a psychedelic, synesthetic quality. The passages about getting high, an abundance of them, rank with the hallucinatory drug writing of Robert Stone, Denis Johnson, and Kate Braverman. Here, she shoots heroin at her drug-connection boyfriend\u2019s house in Albuquerque: \u201cI took off the red sash from the long evening dress I still had on, pulled it around my arm, and rested my arm on my crossed leg knee,\u201d she writes. \u201cI bent over\u2014teeth clenched ravenously on the sash\u2014nice plump aqua veins standing up\u2014then pp<\/em>! The point pierced ever so delicately until that gorgeous little blossom of crimson appeared in the neck of the dropper.\u201d<\/p>\n

But does she write like her father?<\/em> The question is inevitable, if patronizing. Jan herself addressed it directly and pronounced it beside the point. \u201cPeople may read my stuff and think, This is Jack Kerouac\u2019s daughter, let\u2019s see if she\u2019s as good as he is,\u201d she says in Brenda Knight\u2019s Women of the Beat Generation<\/em>. \u201cBut it\u2019s not necessary to make a comparison like that, because I wasn\u2019t trying to emulate his type of writing.\u201d Some moments in Baby Driver <\/em>do clearly mark her not only as his genetic offspring but as his literary and spiritual heir. Palm trees in Phoenix are \u201cgreen spikes protruding from the back of this vast lizardcity,\u201d and she hears a freight train\u2019s \u201cplaintive far-spiraling whistle screaming through the night.\u201d Yet her style, much earthier, is her own. Where the father tended to paint the world with a spiritual or mystical sheen (\u201cHe was very emotional,\u201d Jan once said, \u201cand everything he saw was directly related to his soul\u201d), the daughter writes with shrewd, almost clinical detachment, her language elemental and concrete. She often physicalizes her emotions, as when she describes her stint at the men\u2019s club: \u201cAll this with the amber shield of booze partitioning off the feeling, each motion conveniently down the drain as soon as it\u2019s done\u2014hardly any sensation remembered.\u201d Kerouac launched countless imitators, but his daughter wasn\u2019t among them.<\/p>\n

One of Baby Driver<\/em>\u2019s most bruising and memorable scenes occurs near the end of the novel, when Kerouac visits her father and sums him up with canny, unflinching clarity. Fifteen years old, pregnant with a drug dealer\u2019s baby, and en route to Mexico, she tracks Jack down at his home in Lowell, Massachusetts, to find him sitting in a rocking chair \u201cabout one foot from the TV, upending a fifth of whiskey,\u201d watching The Beverly Hillbillies. <\/em>He is living with his third and last wife, Stella Sampas, and his aging mother, Gabrielle, who is confined to a wheelchair. \u201cNow that his mother could no longer take care of him, Jack had married another mother to take care of them both,\u201d Jan writes. At one point, Jack starts hollering for someone to turn down the TV, complaining that he can\u2019t hear himself think. \u201cThis seemed odd, for he was closer to the TV than anyone else in the room,\u201d Jan observes. \u201cBut someone did turn it down for him, and he continued to guzzle his giant baby bottle, rocking himself as if in a cradle.\u201d This is as pitiless a portrait of the declining Beat legend as we possess, almost thrillingly unsentimental. When Jack learns she\u2019s headed to Mexico (a country he had visited multiple times and romanticized in his novels and poetry),<\/em> his parting words are, \u201cYeah, you go to Mexico an\u2019 write a book. You can use my name.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Kerouac,<\/em> obviously, was her name, too. Although Jan was not yet a writer, fashioning a literary identity apart from her father\u2019s would become a tricky problem for her. In a letter dated November 18, 1977, Ginsberg, her godfather and a mentor to her, responded to a query she had sent him about whether to change the working title of her manuscript from Everthreads <\/em>to Off the Road. <\/em>(Baby<\/em> Driver <\/em>was the suggestion of the publisher.) He urged her to declare her independence as a literary talent: \u201cno need to mirror \u2018The Road\u2019\u2014your name already mirrors your father sufficient, & your prose is your own extension of your named self, no need to fall back on gimmick.\u201d It seems she took his advice. Baby Driver <\/em>treats the subject of her father with artful restraint. He appears in person in the book only twice, as he did in her life (she dramatizes both encounters), while other references to him are oblique. In the opening chapter, a letter arrives in Mexico containing her monthly support check from him for fifty-two dollars, \u201cautographed by the famous wino himself.\u201d And after Ginsberg gives her Jack\u2019s number, she phones him, reaching him, drunk as ever, \u201cin his invisible hideout somewhere out in black-telephone-land.\u201d For all its surface vagabonding, Baby Driver <\/em>is at root an aching tale of unrequited love, a story of yearning for an elusive paternal relationship. The bond between father and daughter that never formed is replaced by a symbolic, artistic bond, the spiritual entanglement of two writers.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Jan Kerouac\u2019s darker and more extreme brand of mischief\u2014the psychedelics, the sex work, the heroin\u2014make her father\u2019s On the Road <\/em>high jinks seem tame and even a tad dilettantish by comparison. Jan writes with the eerie sangfroid of someone who came of age in a harsher, less innocent era. Where her father tended toward breathless lyricism, she is bracingly direct and unvarnished, sometimes brutally so, allowing the bare facts to speak for themselves. She doesn\u2019t apologize, protest, moralize, or pose. Nor does she exaggerate for effect. The bourgeois conventions her father was escaping simply don\u2019t exist for her. \u201cWe felt no grief or anxiety for a life of comfort we\u2019d lost, since we\u2019d never had one,\u201d she writes. By the time she was born, the previous generation\u2019s Beat idealism had come and gone. The hangover was bleak. The celebrated fathers were drunk, dead, or crazy; the wives and girlfriends cast aside and embittered. The neglected children were left to sift through the rubble.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the children of the Beat writers and artists had dysfunctional parents. So what?\u201d one defender of the movement wrote in a letter to the New York Times<\/em>. He was responding to \u201cChildren of the Beats,\u201d a 1995 article by Daniel Pinchbeck, the son of Joyce Johnson, which described the personal destruction wreaked by the revolutionary hipsters. \u201cAt least the Beats produced a body of work that inspired and gave hope to some of us. I\u2019m sorry Jan Kerouac\u2019s father didn\u2019t do much for her\u2014he sure did a hell of a lot for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be abandoned by a father whom so many admired as a cultural father figure is a poignant predicament. When Jan was hospitalized with hepatitis at thirteen years old, a doctor noticed the spelling of her last name, and asked if she was related to the writer; she said she was. \u201cHe thought it was of utmost importance that I read On the Road<\/em>,\u201d she recalls, \u201cand next day he brought it to me.\u201d After staying up all night reading the novel, she has a realization about her father, both melancholy and freeing: \u201cNow that I had a picture of what he\u2019d been doing all this time, all over the country, it made more sense that he hadn\u2019t had time to be fatherly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remarkable triumph of Baby Driver <\/em>is its stubborn resistance to self-pity. No matter how sad her plight, and it was tragic in many ways, Jan Kerouac refuses to play the victim, even when it seems plainly justified. She writes without bitterness or blame, either refusing resentment or immune to it. She owns her experiences, decisions, and flaws, without reservation. Fate sent Jan Kerouac down a difficult road, but she traveled it as if she\u2019d chosen it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From Amanda Fortini\u2019s introduction to <\/em>Baby Driver<\/a> by Jan Kerouac,<\/em> to be published by New York Review Books in November.<\/em><\/p>\n

Amanda Fortini is a columnist for <\/em>County Highway, a frequent contributor to\u00a0<\/em>T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and has also written for\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,\u00a0The Believer,\u00a0California Sunday, the\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review, among other publications. A 2020 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism, she divides her time between Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada. She is at work on a book of essays about Las Vegas titled “Flamingo Road.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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