The Beats: A Graphic History (Verdict: Give it away)
| April 20th, 2009
John Leland at the NYT‘s Weekend Book Review has this to say of Harvey Pekar’s new graphic novel The Beats: A Graphic History:
Some of the history is off. Jan Kerouac was not shown by a blood test to be Jack’s daughter (the test was inconclusive), and Pekar scrambles the chronology of some of Kerouac’s books and stylistic breakthroughs. Nancy J. Peters, a part owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, was unwisely tapped to help write the chapter on the store, which includes lines like “City Lights is not only a bookstore and publisher, it’s a historic public space and an international cultural center,” and “Today, City Lights has come to symbolize the American spirit of free intellectual inquiry.” Here, nonobjective history gives way to plain self-promotion, and not even cool self-promotion.
Leland is a Kerouac scholar, and while I understand Pekar’s intention with the book, it’s sort of disappointing that I agree with him. Leland’s holding Pekar accountable, as people are wont to do when something they hold very near becomes a little tainted. Leland doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea of what the Beats were all about just because they got some bogus information from a book they only bought because they saw American Splendor after they had already seen Sideways.
I wanted a perspective to compare to Leland’s, so I consulted Twitter. My rationale was such that I was sure at least one or two of our more than 300 followers (Thanks, everyone, by the way.) would have read it, and also that they would want to tell me what they thought about it. User tijean47 had this to say:
I bought it, read it and gave it away. As an ardent Kerouac advocate, I was not impressed. Great idea-bad execution.
That’s two strikes, and both from Kerouac aficionados. I’m still recommending that people pick this up (Amazon), if only for the fact that Pekar’s generally astute and can be revelatory in his observations; and even if he can’t draw he’s still one hell of a great writer when he isn’t taking his cues from a part owner with a vested interest in bolstering her own bookstore.
The Mad Ones [The New York Times]
