Volume 10, Number 7 · April 11, 1968
Prop Art
By Jack Richardson
Vanity of Duluoz
by Jack Kerouac
Coward-McCann, 280 pp., $5.50
The Answer
by Jeremy Larner
Macmillan, 216 pp., $4.95
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
by William H. Gass
Harper & Row, 224 pp., $4.95
If Jack Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz and Jeremy Larner's The Answer were put together between one cover they would make a saga on the regenerative powers of each generation to consider itself unique and to write about this with an ineptness and banality indistinguishable from its predecessor. Kerouac, in his forties, Larner, in his twenties, both take up the search for identity, and grimly turn it into exercises so similar that one wonders whether America is not producing a literary Snopes family which we are doomed to see advertising itself with steamy prose every twenty years or so. It is uncanny how these two books, one an autobiography, the other written in the first-person singular, blend together to chronicle an inbred sensibility whose only purpose seems to be to publish vague musings about itself.
Review, 2423 words
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