Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

Author - Joyce Johnson ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Penguin (Non-Classics) was reviewed on 25-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Penguin (Non-Classics). I just finished reading this novel yesterday, I loved the novel and how Johnson describes life in that inner circle. I agree with other reviews, do not read this book if you´re only interested in Kerouac. What I came to realise was Johnson´s point of view was not only to the idea of being a "minor character" in the history it self, but the fact that women during that time frame were only considered minor characters in life. I highly recommend this novel to any.¤

2) Paperback Book Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Penguin (Non-Classics). 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.
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3) Paperback Book Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Penguin (Non-Classics). This was the third book I bought at the City LIghts bookstore when I was there in 2005 or so. It was this one, a book of beat poety and a collection of San Francisco short stories. I read the beat poetry and this memoir at about the same time, which was a good way of doing so, as many of them dovetailed. I bought it for Joyce, not for Kerouac, as I´m not his biggest fan anyway and have never read On the Road. Was very impressed. It does a good job of showing the lives of the beats and how they lived and the insanity moments of them. Captured the feel of it. But sad. I liked Elise and Hettie a lot and kinda want to read Hettie´s memoir too. And probably the dudes at some point too. I like when she´s talking about beatnik as a commodification situation.¤

4) Paperback Book Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Penguin (Non-Classics). This memoir recounting a young woman´s years spent in the inner circle of Jack Kerouac is well-written and gripping enough to hold its readers´ attention. Placed firmly in the center of the Beat Generation, her story teems with indecision and insecurity, the desire to get up and go, leaving responsibilities at home to see the nation and experience life.

-- Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens¤

5) Paperback Book Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Penguin (Non-Classics). Joyce Glassman´s memoir is very well written and is truly a fascinating account. She manages to describe a scene and give the reader a glimpse of a particular era--long gone. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the 1950´s, the beat generation, women in the 1950´s, and New York City at that time.¤

6) Paperback Book Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Penguin (Non-Classics). Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Johnson´s Beat memoir is "the safe-deposit box that contains the last, precious scrolls of the New York ´50s" (The Washington Post).

Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women´s Liberation.

Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.

"Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations." --San Francisco Chronicle

"--A first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad." --E. L. Doctorow

"Realistic rather than flamboyant, [Johnson] succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals." --The New Yorker¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 22-Nov-2008, 01402835799780140283570, 960-790-790-660-300-700-851-8

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