Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

I'll be honest: there is no love lost between me and the Beats. As much as I appreciate their writing for the literary value, I've never found too much to interest me in the people themselves. After reading entirely too many biographies on various big wigs in the movement, I've gotten somewhat tired of the same stories told by people who are academically removed from the people they are writing about. It is boring, and no one has made any of the writers and their circle come alive for me.That was Joyce Johnson's biggest success here. She brought these characters alive for me and made me feel for them and sympathize with them. I am not one hundred percent sure what the reason is, but I suspect her own love for these people played a large part in my own warming to them. I could see them not just as these detached literary figures, sanctified by generations of hipster kids, but as real people, with real flaws. And instead of those flaws making my distaste for the Beats feel vindicated, they made invited me into the lives of these men and especially the women. And I didn't want to leave.Even though I already knew how the story ended for all these characters, both major and minor, I didn't want the end of the book to come. Even as I rushed headlong toward the end of the narrative, I didn't want to reach that last page. I was hoping that Johnson would finish on the happy notes, or at least the bittersweet ones. But she doesn't hold back. Just as she let us into the lives of these rising stars of literature, she also let us into their downfall--either into anonymity or early death. Or both.

Joyce Johnson's memoir of emerging from an overprotected childhood and landing at the center of the Beat movement in the 1950's is a delight whether you choose to read it for its portrait of Jack Kerouac, for the world that was, or for the inner journey it reveals. It is a fine literary performance. Johnson plays with tense and perspective as if they form a telescopic lens sliding the past out of a fuzzy black and white still photograph into a vivid, colorful present. There is a suspenseful tension to the book from which flows a novelistic structure, never, though, at the expense of truth. Johnson gets down like no one else how it is to carry around that overprotected childhood, to always feel that you could be missing something, that the center has yet to be achieved. Her inner struggle matches the themes of the Beats who are seeking the pure experience of being through their music, their talk, their drugs and alcohol, their lovemaking, their travels and their poetry. She nails the paradox of a quarry that can never sit still, whether it is a person, like Kerouac, or her friend and guide into the Beat world, Elise Cowen, both of whom eventually disappear into their demons. She captures the loss of balance when counterculture is encroached upon by the mainstream. She manages to convey all this without telling, just through showing the events of her life. Johnson is wry but never bitter, she takes full responsibility for her own choices and actions. This is a book that invites the reader to share the wonder that this was all, indeed, real.

Joyce Jamison is a special writer; I don't know how Joyce was able to write with such clear insight about herself and others who were part of the "Beat Generation". She writes with clarity, honesty, & humor about her compatriots (e.g. Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg etc) so well it makes it hard to put this book down. A wonderful writer of heartfelt compassion; no wonder Minor Characters is still in print. A must read!

I'm going through my Amazon purchases and the fact that I bought this book is a huge endorsement. I'm a life long library rat, and while I do buy books, I don't often buy the books I've already checked out and read. This one was just so revealing about the time and setting in which it unfolds. The texture is rich and the story is compelling. It isn't remotely a tell-all, but a different point of view and a first person account that speaks for those in the background and yet part of historic moments.

I love Jack Kerouac and have done since I discovered him at age 12 in 1961. This woman sheds real interesting and very insightful light on what this period was REALLY like with out all the romanticism and hype, and especially what it was like for the brilliant and largely unknown women who were part of it! Johnson is a terrific writer in her own right and she describes that period from an incredibly complex and dense perspective. I learned some new things here on multiple levels.

If you're interested in the era of the beat generation, you'll enjoy this book. It's well-written and I fell in love with all the characters. Based on Joyce's true experiences as a young girl infatuated with the poets and musicians of that era who became Jack Kerouac's girl friend for a brief but influential time in her life.

Baby boomers will recognize the freewheeling emotions and impulses described in this book about the late '50s, because these were ours in the '60s and '70s. Joyce Johnson's own transformation, and her close observations of her beat companions and the intellectual stew of NY in the late '50s, give hints of what will happen to America in the following 15 years.In particular, the author has a unique ability to articulate the feelings female baby boomers absorbed growing up, before the feminist revolution swept us away in the early 70s. As a small example, she points out how girls reading adventurous novels (like On the Road) didn't separate themselves from the guys but fully inhabited the male characters. Male narrators are not a problem for women the way female narrators can be for men.

I'm surprised at just how well written this memoir is. Each sentence seems perfectly poised. The book captures an interesting perspective on the "beat generation," -- a certain pre-feminist moment.