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David makes the Globe & Mail's "Top Books of 2009." See their site for more info.
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What Happened Later
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What Happened Later has been named a finalist in the 2008 Trillium Book Awards!
Listen to CBC's Cross Country Checkup with Ray discussing 1967 right here.
Poetic, poignant and clever, What Happened Later is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book.
In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Late that summer, accompanied by his friend, Joe Chaput, Kerouac set out for Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, on a spiritual quest to connect with his French-Canadian roots. Predictably, the trip was a drunken, chaotic disaster, and a little more than two years afterward, Kerouac was dead.
Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger-than-life-myth of Jack Kerouac, a working-class, small-town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarked upon his own quest--to own a copy of On The Road. Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, and also begins to comprehend his own French-Canadian heritage.
Taking its title from Kerouac himself—"What Happened Later" was the title of his proposed sequel to On The Road—this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac's famous book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author. Interweaving the story of one author's slow decline with one boy's literary coming of age, "What Happened Later" explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.
"Two wonderful characters emerge from What Happened Later. The first is Jack Kerouac, fully-blown and reeling drunkenly through the cosmos. The second is Ray Robertson himself—compassionate, wise, and very, very funny."
—Paul Quarrington (author of Galveston and Whale Music)