Book review #61: Baby Driver

Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac (New York Review of Books, 2025)

Reviewed by Jonah Raskin, Chief Book Reviewer

THE REISSUED EDITION of Jan Kerouac’s novel Baby Driver, which was first published in 1981, comes with a lively introduction by Amanda Fortini and with enthusiastic blurbs from Katie Rolphe, who calls it ‘a tour de force’ and Heidi Julavitz, who writes ‘my favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down’.

In the New York Times, critic Dwight Garner called it ‘possibly this year’s most important literary salvage mission’. It is indeed fortunate for readers of Beat Generation literature to have this book by Jack Kerouac’s daughter available again and in a nifty paperback edition.

But can a book published in the early 1980s by a novelist born in 1952 and who died in 1996 be considered a Beat book? It can if you allow that Beat writers don’t belong to a particular time period, but rather share a kind of world outlook that sees the sacred even in the sordid and the everyday and that embodies a desire to experience everything under the sun and write about it. If that’s what it means to be Beat, then Jan is up there with Jack and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and Gregory Corso.

Baby Driver makes it clear that Jan was the daughter of her roving/writer father, and at the same time the daughter of her risk-taking mother, Joan Haverty (1931-1990) who exhibits in the pages of Baby Driver a ‘charming aura of chaos and disorder’. Jan is also her very own person and a child of the 1960s, a vagabond, a consumer of drugs and a kind of sexual outlaw on a quest across continents who aims to escape from ennui and get to the heart of human existence.

She and Natalie Jackson, who was one of Neal Cassady’s lovers and who appears in The Dharma Bums as ‘Rosie Buchanan’, are soul sisters. There is no character the equivalent of Neal Cassady in Baby Driver, though Jan’s mother Joan, who she describes as sisterly, comes the closest.

Though Miguel Cervantes noted in Don Quixote that ‘Comparisons are odious’, and though Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde said much the same thing, New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner can’t stop himself from comparing Jan’s writing style with her father’s.

‘So few children of major writers write as well as their famous parents did,’ he exclaims. ‘Jan Kerouac is not the exception to this rule. Her prose is nothing like her father’s.’ Amanda Fortini, Heidi Julavits and Katie Rolph disagree. They prefer Jan’s poetic prose to Jack’s. In the contest between father and daughter, I’d rather not take sides. Why not have both Jack and Jan? After all, comparisons are odious.

Jan is a masterful storyteller who moves deftly back and forth from present to past and back to present and leaps from New York to New Mexico to Mexico and Peru and back to the States. I admire her descriptive passages, her sharp memory, her vivid imagination, her lyricism and her honesty about herself and those around her even as she comes dangerously close to the edge and spends time as a patient in mental hospitals out of her mind.

‘First memories are somewhere in an undefined, white-blurred cubicle near a gaping fireplace, pigeons cooing,’ she writes at the start of chapter three which begins with Jan as a baby in her crib, and when the book really catches fire. Of the pigeons she adds, ‘I imitated their guttural calls, even fancied that they flew down sometimes and lighted on the white rungs of my crib.’

She can imitate her father’s elegiac writing, William Burroughs’ dark passages and the rhythms of Allen Ginsberg, her godfather, who wisely told her, ‘no need to mirror “The Road” – your name already mirrors your father sufficient, & your prose is your own extension of your named self, no need to fall back on gimmick.’

There are no gimmicks in Baby Driver, only an abundance of authentic unadulterated experiences. After she uses heroin and imagines it perversely ‘nurturing her blood, she tells herself, ‘I was the boss. I had control over the whole affair’, even as she loses control, and, like a femme fatale in a noir thriller, sinks down lower and lower into ‘a pit of rational vipers’.

The title for the book doesn’t come from her father or the Beatles (I thought of ‘Drive My Car’) as I originally assumed, but rather from Paul Simon who sang, ‘They call me Baby Driver/And once upon a pair of wheels/ Hit the road and I’m gone ah’, in the 1970 song which shares the title of Jan Kerouac’s book.

Jan hits the road again and again, unable to stay in one place or sit still for long. While the novel offers plenty of sex, albeit no pornography, and a whole pharmacology of drugs, from pot to speed, heroin to peyote, there isn’t much music and very little rock‘n’roll though occasionally Jan listens to the Beatles, Willie Nelson and James Brown.

In one of the many hospitals where she was a patient, a doctor asked her if she was ‘any relation to Jack Kerouac’. Without missing a beat she said, ‘Yes, of course. He’s my son.’ Perhaps she felt that in her relationship with Jack he was the child and she was the adult. When she traveled to Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack’s birthplace, she met Jack’s third wife, Stella, along with Jack’s mother and the tribe of French Canadian relations who she calls ‘my people’.

An astute student of human psychology, she observed her father watching The Beverly Hillbillies on TV, and guzzling a fifth of whiskey. She astutely observed, ‘Now that his mother could no longer take care of him, Jack had married another mother to take care of them both.’ The sections of the book about Jan and Jack alone are worth the price of admission.

The same doctor who asked her if she was related to Jack Kerouac gifted her a copy of On the Road which she read, she says, ‘all in one night’, instead of ingesting a Seconal. Almost always forgiving of her father, she writes, ‘now that I had a picture of what he had been doing all this time, all over the country, it made more sense that he hadn’t the time to be fatherly’.

Reading Baby Driver I felt a connection to Jan and remembered my own drug-taking days, my vagabonding across the US, on the road in Mexico, and also what might be called my sexual escapades. Like her, I was a baby driver and was driven.

The key word in the last paragraph of the novel is ‘words’. Jan didn’t have a fatherly father or a consistently motherly mother, but she always had words to nurture and comfort and taunt her. To the world at large, she returned the gift of words which make Baby Driver an exciting and a richly rewarding reading experience.

In addition to her debut book, Jan, who died aged 44, even younger than her father, wrote two other novels, Train Song (1988) and Parrot Fever (2005), published posthumously. The Beat, as they say, goes on and on and from generation to generation.