Jan Kerouac’s famous father might have written the definitive 20th-century road trip story, but it is Jan, Jack’s half-acknowledged daughter, who best understands the glory and terror of being lost. Her 1981 novel, Baby Driver, freshly reissued by New York Review Books, is, like On the Road, a circuitous, loosely autobiographical story of journeying. It’s impossible not to think about it in conversation with that earlier work, an inevitability the younger Kerouac certainly anticipated (she died in 1996 of complications from kidney failure, at just 44). But Baby Driver never lets that conversation subsume its own interests. It is another midcentury American picaresque, yes, but it’s also a meditation on family, feeling small, and, most compellingly, a very young woman’s attempt to make her way in a world that likes to blur the difference between independence and exploitation.
Jan, as Baby Driver’s protagonist is also named, is frank about her fascination with her absent dad, whom she meets for the first time at the age of nine, after her mother, near destitution, compels him to take a paternity test and pay child support. When Jan reads On the Road a few years later, given a copy by her doctor while she’s hospitalized with hepatitis (this interrupting a stay in juvenile detention), she’s equally enthralled and appreciative. “I was happy to know that my father’s thought patterns were so similar to mine,” she reflects. “Also, now that I had a picture of what he’d been doing all this time…it made more sense that he hadn’t had the time to be fatherly.” One might expect the older Jan recalling this moment to offer some insight into her 13-year-old self. But here, as she does often, our narrator prefers immediacy to retrospection, a savvy choice that lets the reader form their own opinions and keeps attention focused on the younger Jan’s tenacious attempts at self-determination.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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More subtly, though, Baby Driver invites rumination on the fallout from absence and loss, playing with sequence to underscore patterns over a progression. The novel opens in medias res, Jan’s life already at a climax. Fifteen and pregnant by her ex, she’s living somewhere south of Puerto Vallarta with her older boyfriend, John. Within pages, her baby will be stillborn. She and John, increasingly at odds, head north, through San Francisco and then on to her mother’s home in Washington State. From there, the narrative cleaves. One thread follows Jan’s childhood, through Missouri and the tenements of Lower East Side Manhattan. The other traces her travels through the Southwest and beyond after she and John part, the stillbirth both a rupture and a conjunction.
Given the raw drama of Kerouac’s life and the propulsiveness of her narration, this split-screen structure might seem gratuitous, a gesture toward fictional artifice in a largely autobiographical novel. But as each thread unspools, intriguing contrasts emerge. In one passage, we find Jan with her mother and siblings, crowded onto a mattress in a welfare hotel following an eviction from a dilapidated apartment. Pages later, in the other thread, the older Jan giddily assumes care of a friend’s substantial home in the Santa Fe hills. Back in New York, child Jan, never more at ease than when roaming her neighborhood’s grimy pavement, revels in the feeling of omniscience she gets while perched on tenement roofs and fire escapes, surveying her domain from above. In New Mexico, her borrowed adobe house “crouch[es]” over her, heavy and solid, yes, but smothering.
Such double-edged stability becomes one of Baby Driver’s abiding interests. In Kerouac’s telling, it’s hard sought, but once found, it’s always a breath away from captivity. At one point, sent off by her overwhelmed mother to her uncle’s home in upstate New York, Jan lists its comforts as though to convince herself of their value: “no trudging up flights of stairs, no hunger, no danger of being beaten up or killed on the street, no running after buses or freezing feet in the winter, no roaches…nothing.” And there’s the rub. Always fascinated by the tactile, the physical, the specific, Kerouac depicts bougie ease as curiously numbing.
But then, so, too, are drugs and sex. However counterculture her dad might have been, Jan has him beat. At the age of 12, she’s regularly dropping acid. Heroin and booze have taken its place by the time she gets to Santa Fe. In need of cash, she flirts with sex work, eventually joining a high-end brothel, the Silver Spot Social Club, in Phoenix. There is certainly gratification in Kerouac’s portrayals of these experiences. The act of shooting heroin, for example, is all palpable delight, from the wad of cotton “sumptuous” with the drug to the “gorgeous little blossom of crimson” that flowers when the needle pierces her flesh. But no sooner is the pleasure felt than it, too, subsides into a kind of nonfeeling, the drug “interr[ing]” her in a “bare shadowy place,” the sex “partition[ed] off…hardly any sensation remembered.”
What never fades for Jan, though, is the sheer wonder of the world’s vastness—and her own capacity to access it. She feels the first such epiphany on a bus in Manhattan, catapulted toward the realization in “a tiny dizzying second” as she “bounc[es] down on the ripped green plastic seat in awe.” She will feel it again and again as she flies through deserts and jungles, by land and air, in careening trucks and Cadillacs, on planes and boats. At one point, adrift “in the warm black night” of Costa Rica, she almost literally tunes into the feeling with a shortwave radio, “juicing out the wild far-off tunes…then pummeling deep ships’ engine rhythms and spirally whistling spleeps from Andromeda or someplace.”
What Kerouac is describing in these moments is a kind of sublimity, the feeling of her own stunning smallness in the grand scope of things, usually as fleeting as that first rush of heroin but, unlike the high, always leaving her somehow freer, more herself than she was before. In another example of the novel’s many mirrorings, this sublime self-transcendence has its own troubled inverses. In Manhattan, when not roving streets and rooftops, Jan is often confined to institutions—teeming schools, hospitals, and detention centers—whose strict conformities seem tailor-made for the cruel diminishment of self. And often, too, she is diminished—forgotten or undervalued—in her relationships with men. This is true not only of her father but also of domineering boyfriends, who turn her predilection for adventure against her.
It seems right that a writer perpetually shadowed by her father’s name finds a form of triumph in her depiction of the self’s insignificance and the world’s “glorious hugeness which made nothing else worth worrying about.” As though she’s viewing her own life from that god’s-eye perspective of the tenement roof, Kerouac regards both herself and her flawed parents with equanimity and generous understanding. Perhaps it’s a show—yet another rebellious assertion of self-determination—but within the confines of the novel, it’s wholly convincing.
If Baby Driver’s adventures and epiphanies recall those of On the Road, the sheer force of will Jan Kerouac exerts to achieve them—and the true peril she embraces to find them—lends them a poignancy and a splendor all their own. It is one thing, after all, for a man to seek adventure in a world made by adventuring men. It is very much another for a girl to see this and still claim the road for herself.•
