Culture November 27, 2013

Walter Salles’s Kerouac biopic On the Road had an uneventful drive-by this year, along with Joyce Johnson’s The Voice Is All: the Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, a stab at critical biography by the author of several memoirs of the Beat writer, with whom she was romantically involved a half century ago. Lamenting these two weak offerings on the Kerouac aftermarket, Andrew O’Hagan opined recently how real life—not just Kerouac’s but seemingly everyone’s around him—has “spoiled the magic” of On the Road.” He spares neither the deadbeat dads and wife-pimping husbands of the Beat Generation (more on that later), nor