Jack Kerouac's On the Road shook up literary and cultural America when it was published in 1957. For the sweet, yearning characters of Larry Closs's debut novel, the Beat Generation's aura still shakes, stirs and inspires their world in 1995.
Harry Charity no sooner meets Jay Bishop, a new co-worker at Element magazine, than he discovers their mutual obsession with On the Road and the Beats. Intense lunchtime discussions climax in a visit to the New York Public Library restoration department to worship at the shrine of Kerouac's original scroll manuscript of his masterwork, and Harry and Jay's friendship slips toward a fraught bromance. Jay has a girlfriend who senses her exclusive territory is being invaded; Harry is scarred from two previous relationships that couldn't go where he wanted. Yet neither takes the easy way out by backing off the deep emotional connection they feel.
Questions of loving versus being in love play out as Harry tries to break free of his past disastrous behavior patterns. As he reminds Jay's girlfriend, Kerouac took "Beat" from the biblical Beatitudes to signify "to be in love with life." Closs captures Harry's struggle to accept the tension/balance between the ideal he wishes he could realize and real life beautifully, most movingly in his meetings with Allen Ginsberg--even when the idol unapologetically displays feet of clay, he can provide wisdom and direction. Charity, Harry finally learns, may be the spirit of giving but the depth of the impulse lies in knowing what the recipient can accept. --John McFarland, author