Book Review : Kerouac’s Daughter on the Road

Trainsong by Jan Kerouac (Henry Holt: $15.95; 210 pages)

Perhaps without meaning to be, “Trainsong” is a sad reminder that women are still exceedingly different from men in this society, or that what they do is perceived very differently. Jan Kerouac is, of course, the daughter of Jack Kerouac, whose “On the Road” became an American classic. Kerouac pere wrote about the glory and weirdness of parking cars for a living.

He wrote about his wonderful six weeks with “the Mexican girl,” and how they parted sadly, by railroad tracks, with no recriminations. He wrote about a thinly fictionalized Allen Ginsberg sitting on a rumpled bed for hours at a time, searching for the immortality in us all.

Kerouac wrote endlessly, about the Beat Generation, all their other adventures, and about Dharma Bums, but it slipped his mind--he more or less forgot to mention--that he’d fathered a child and abandoned her mother while he went off for years on his extended American toot.

She Saw Father Only Twice

Jan Kerouac would see her father only twice--in court and at a doctor’s office--during a hearing and blood test to establish his paternity. Jack would be the archetypal neglectful father; Jan, the archetypal abandoned child. The dynamic then, in Jan’s life, would go like this: Daddy was a writer; I will write. Daddy scorned beginnings, middles and ends; I too will scorn them. Daddy traveled; I will trek, then, to South America, Mexico, Morocco. Daddy loved railroad tracks; I will walk the rails. Daddy had sex with anything that moved; all right, I’m up for that too.

By this imitative magic, Jan Kerouac hopes to move in to the company of her father--not, I think, to rival him in letters, but to bring him back like a miniature Princess Leah in a lifelike holograph.

But the elements that Jan can’t conjure up by imitative magic are that Jack Kerouac loved what he was writing about; also, he was writing as the spoiled and pampered son of a mother who was there to take care of him until the very end.

Jan is writing as, at once, “the Princess of the Beat Generation,” and a daughter whose father literally wouldn’t give her the time of day. She’s a gamin, an air plant who lives on neglect.

Here’s Jan, beginning with her return home from her South American jaunt: “I hadn’t seen my mother or brother for three years, except for a brief, chaotic visit when I had breezed up from the massage parlors . . . even my own mother had hardly recognized me through the facade of dyed, teased hair, hot pants and spike heels: the whorish cocoon I’d spun around myself. But . . . four months in South America had changed me considerably. Filled with new experiences and saturated with jungle essence of the Peruvian Amazon, I had a scorching desire to speak Spanish with my mother.”

An Unbearable Sadness

Already you know where Jan is coming from. Already you know that no matter how many places she goes, or railroad tracks she walks; how poverty-stricken she becomes, how many guys she notches on her gun, Jan will never capture her father’s magic--not in a million years. Because, sad to say, when a guy picks up a girl down by the tracks and has sex with her out under some bushes it’s “adventure.” When a girl gets picked up by a married Mexican laborer, drinks gallons of cheap wine and has sex out under the bushes--one hates to say it, one deplores saying it, but the whole scene carries a different resonance. There is a sadness to this book that’s almost unbearable.

“I need to be ignored because it reminds me of my father,” Jan thinks, trapped with brutish goons out in Tangerian boondocks, and so she can try this, in haphazard, episodic fashion, to find a string of losers who ignore her, or worse: Alphonso, Bertrand, Bruce, Stan, Lawrence, Malcolm--these guys come straight from the very bottom of the sociological trash heap--but what’s the fictional point?

Jobs She Likes

Jan kites checks, does some short time in jail, but she only has two jobs she ever likes: grooming horses and baking bread. The rest of the time she’s stuck in back-breaking, low-paying jobs, and why? American male authors, in the ‘50s stereotype, were obliged to work in canneries and so on; women in the ‘80s don’t really have to.

No female friends here, no education, no money, no nothing. Even the literary lions Jan meets--in this account--look right past her. Allen Ginsberg nags her to think about her father; Ken Kesey wants to ride with her to a conference on the Beat Generation. The late Richard Brautigan is too drunk to notice at all. It’s a damned shame, retroactively saddening, kindling in the reader a lively sense that maybe Jack Kerouac wasn’t a Dharma Bum after all; maybe he was just a bum, you know?

Under this formalist narrative, sometimes you hear another, cool, ironic face: That’s Jan herself writing, apart from all the hang-ups. May her next book be written in that tone.