Baby Driver [Paperback]

The first novel by Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack—a thrilling work of autobiographical fiction that captures with inspired detail a life driven by adventure, drugs, far-flung travel, and like her father, a relentless quest for pure experience.

“If [Jack] Kerouac sometimes put a spiritual gloss on poverty and life on the edge, his daughter offered an unflinching vision.” —The Guardian

“Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue.” Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. Her sojourn there–both thrilling and heartbreaking–marks the beginning of a life of restless wandering. Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac, first published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Fearless and frank, Baby Driver is the story of a difficult childhood, marked by maternal warmth and paternal disregard, and of the heady freedom and precariousness of self-reliance. My favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down. Gritty pointilism meets lyricism in this novel that reads like a spiritual how-to. How to rise above, how to survive, how to portray a life, and the complicated, neglectful people in that life, with magnanimity and honesty. —Heidi Julavits

Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver is a clear-eyed corrective to her father's ecstatic hooey in On the Road. These far grimmer adventures on a far darker road lead to a tentatively hopeful homecoming–but the real upbeat ending is this book's very existence. —David Gates

Lush, melodic, and unsentimentally genial, Baby Driver plunges fearlessly into feeling and experience, so beatific in lÓ&