What Happened Later Reviews
Like Elliott, Ray Robertson makes himself a character in his latest book, but the similarities stop there. Robertson's book is a stylistically ambitious, structurally complex novel that explores the parallel stories of Jack Kerouac's last road trip to explore his French-Canadian roots in Riviere-du-Loup, and the story of a typical small-town teenager who falls under the spell of Kerouac's myth. The dual narratives give the novel a pleasing symmetry, and while the book may sound overly formal, it transcends these ambitions and is an entertaining read.
—Brendan Harrison Fast Forward Weekly's Roundup of New and Notable Books
What Happened Later is a tour de force. The book contains two stories hinged together in alternating chapters.
One narrative follows Jack Kerouac's drug-and drink-induced decline 10 years after his catapult to stardom with On The Road.
The second story tells of a boy named Ray Robertson as he navigates childhood and adolescence in a blue'collar neighbourhood in a southwestern Ontario town.
The passages fictionalized from Robertson's childhood are often poignant, often very funny, and sometimes both at the same time. His reminiscence of a Christmas gift gone wrong is hilarious.
The sections featuring Kerouac centre on a road trip taken in 1967 when Jack and his friend, Joe Chaput, hit the road in search of Kerouac's Canadian roots.
"His father's father had been a farmer in a small village on the outskirts of Riviere-du-Loop, and that's where they were headed... Joe was behind the wheel because Jack didn't have a driver's licence. The author of On The Road didn't drive."
The chapters that imagine Kerouac's life are written as if powered by jet fuel. The speed with which the sentences roar across the page embody the hell-bent-for-leather pace of Kerouac's days of chugging Chivas Regal while on highways heading for Quebec.
—Mary Jo Anderson The Chronicle Herald
"He honored life" —so reads Jack Kerouac's tombstone. Ray Robertson does his best to honour Kerouac's life in his fifth novel. What Happened Later depicts Kerouac's latter stages of existence while also detailing the smalltown Ontario adolescence of a teenager named Ray Robertson. Thus, the novel reveals both the book-mad, girl-groping start and the booze- and drug-fuelled decline of The Artist.
The reflective first-person narrator in the Robertson chapters tracks a teen's journey from the music of the Doors to Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. En route, the young Robertson begins a futile hunt for On the Road, a novel beloved by Doors frontman Jim Morrison, and one that the boy just knows will become his own favourite. Robertson-the-writer contrasts the external world of early-1980s Chatham — its lawnmower roar, T-ball thwack, air conditioner drone — with the interior world of an otherness-starved teen who reads about Kerouac's mysterious athlete-poet hands before "setting the book down on the bed and looking at my own hands. Looking, and wondering, wondering..."
The Kerouac chapters chronicle the writer being ferried by his friend (and surrogate mother figure) Joe Chaput as they road-trip north from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, in search of Kerouac's paternal grandfather's farm. The 1967 Kerouac can't start his day without brandy and bennies, but the novel frequently flashes back to his athletic and working-writer past.
Robertson, in imagistic prose, moves adroitly between his own fictionalized youth and the story of the steadily weakening Kerouac. Chaput is one of the novel's finely etched minor characters, answering questions about Kerouac thus: "He's a great bunch of guys." Only the book's italicized dialogue mars the style; it's as if Robertson wanted to do something different, after the quotation mark-less dialogue of Cormac McCarthy et al.
Still, what we have in What Happened Later is an ambitious, dramatic, and creative memoir. Robertson, who has mined his own life for fiction before in 2005's Gently Down the Stream, has written a novel that attests to his ongoing fascination with the artistic life. Clearly, it's what he knows best.
—Harold Hoefle Quill & Quire
Something's happened to Ray Robertson. And that something is Jack Kerouac.
I've been left cold by Robertson's previous fiction, but What Happened Later, a ripping riff on Kerouac and what he means to a fictional character named Ray Robertson, is wildly effective.
Robertson gives an account of the beat author's alcohol-fuelled trip to search for his roots in Montreal in 1967. Kerouac's a complete wreck - bitter, burnt out and just two years away from drinking himself to death.
The author interrupts that story with episodes from Ray's teenage years in Chatham, where the adolescent Doors fanatic desperately seeks a copy of On The Road to feed his Kerouac obsession
One of the ironies here is how a teenager can be smitten with a writer whose essential work he's never read. Robertson highlights that gap between fantasy and reality - and pursues his theme of deluded hero worship - by showing us a Kerouac who is nasty, racist, anti-Semitic and hopelessly in love with America. In doing so, he sets the record straight for anyone who imagines this beat bum was the catalyst who took America from the 50s to the 60s counterculture.
Robertson wisely resists the temptation to mimic Kerouac's prose style - rambling sentences questionably punctuated and obviously designed to outrage literary purists - and instead gives us a clear-eyed tale of how a genuine talent gets utterly wasted, in all senses of the word, and another one grows.
The title refers to the name of the book Kerouac was supposed to write but could never finish. But while the story's a bit sad and Kerouac's downright pathetic, it has a huge amount of humour and heart.
The year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road. We'll doubtless be seeing tributes galore, but I can't think of a better one than this.
—Susan G. Cole NOW Magazine
Once upon a time, two fledgling writers went on a pilgrimage to the grave of Jack Kerouac, in Lowell, Mass. It was a journey filled with great portents, high emotion and wild craziness, mostly of the self-conscious kind. Yet it was the kind of thing young writers felt they ought to do, and so they did it.
Years later, one of them would try to recapture how it felt to disembark in that grim factory town at dusk; to bribe the cemetery caretaker with a sawbuck and a pack of cigarettes; to stand in awe at the final resting place of a mind once capable of moving an entire generation up off its collective posterior and onto the road; and, most of all, how it felt to be on that same road for the sake of it, senses wide open, taking in every detail.
Those efforts would end in failure, for most any attempt at duplicating a moment will fizzle. Yet somehow,in What Happened Later, Ray Robertson has figured out a way to do it. The result is a highly pleasing synthesis of characters, places and times that at first glance have nothing to do with one another, but which are ultimately entwined on the levels of spirit, poetry and self-exploration.
What Happened Later was the title that Jack Kerouac intended to give his never-finished sequel to On The Road. Robertson's version is really two stories: one, a fictionalized account of Kerouac's last real-life road trip, in 1967, to Riviere-du-Loup, Que., to explore his Quebecois heritage; the other, the coming of age of a young man in Chatham, Ont., in the 1980s.
Ray Robertson is the name of both the author and the younger protagonist. This leads to some early confusion as to whether we are reading a real autobiography, or merely a thinly veiled one. The confusion is enhanced by the fact that those chapters set in Ontario don't feel like a novel at all. They have the same air of part guilty conscience and part "thank God that's over" that all good autobiographies have. Often, I forgot that what I was reading was supposed to be fiction. But this did not detract from my enjoyment of it in the slightest.
Robertson's upbringing was, in a handful of ways, similar to Kerouac's: working-class parents of French-Canadian descent; a constant chafing at the fetters of suburbia; a sense that the sublime exists somewhere, and that in order to find it, one must not just leave home but transcend it.
But Robertson doesn't attempt to make more of these tenuous connections than he should. Instead, he is frank about the real reason he, or his fictitious alter ego, fell in love with Kerouac: The beat writer was the favourite author of Doors singer Jim Morrison, and for that reason alone, he decided ahead of time that Kerouac would be his favourite, too.
It takes a few chapters to get used to the rhythm of this curiously constructed book, but its unorthodox architecture is precisely what's appealing about it. The stories converge on each other gradually, like railroad tracks vanishing in the distance.
Robertson's prose is effortless. His chapters on Kerouac, comprising half the book, are so vivid that one easily imagines the sights, sounds and smells of that northbound car in 1967, containing a moribund Jack and his hung-over friend, Joe Chaput, who often wished he was somewhere else, but who loved Kerouac too much to abandon him.
These chapters are all written in a style that purports to imitate both Kerouac's Benzedrine-enhanced conversational patter and his spontaneous prose style; aside from striking a few slightly too glib notes, it succeeds. Though some writers might choose to debate the merits - or even the point - of imitative versus original work, this is no mean feat. And Robertson takes it several layers deeper than mere mimicry. This is a study of Kerouac the human being, who he was and how he got to be that way; it is not just more adulatory gushing from yet another pie-eyed devotee, but a moving, insightful psychological portrait of a man who, for millions of readers, personified the freedom of the Beat Generation and the spirit of life on the road.
As the book nears its middle, the convergence of storylines begins to happen subtly. Ray is trying to track down a copy of On The Road, but it proves ridiculously elusive. (Neither of the Coles bookstores in his town has it, nor does the library.) Chatham being Chatham, no one even thinks to inform the hopeful young man that he could special order it.
But the book's absence, though frustrating, proves to be a good thing for the budding writer. Perhaps if his wish had been granted immediately, brief satisfaction would have been followed by a longing for something else, and that, in turn, might have led to him working in an office somewhere - or perhaps even ending up as "the philosopher-in-residence at Sears" that he so dreaded becoming. What Happened Later demonstrates that not getting what we want is sometimes the best possible outcome.
Best of all, the congenital empty ache in the heart that makes writers writers is well captured in this marvellously schizophrenic novel, which, like all good novels, lingers in the mind long after it's been put down.
—William Kowalski Globe & Mail
The object of pursuit in Ray Robertson's new novel, running ahead of us like a mechanical rabbit on a greyhound track, is a book. But not just any book. No, for some, and certainly for the character named Ray Robertson, whose Bildungsroman this is, it would be the book of all books: Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
One way of looking at the novel, which bears the title of what was to have been Kerouac's sequel, is reductively comical: as Ray's search for a copy of the work that Jim Morrison, the first inspiration of his life, had been so taken with.
"As soon as I got a chance to read On the Road," he tells us early on, "Jack Kerouac was going to be my favourite author." Finding that copy in a town the size and condition (as depicted) of Chatham, Ont., proves to be surprisingly difficult. Then again, young Ray has an awful lot of growing up to do; his frustrated search is only part of it - even if it's the one part the reader can't let go of.
And that's because another way of looking at the novel ("There were two ways of looking at everything, everybody knew that") is far from comical - as the reanimation, by loving pastiche, of the whole Kerouac saga, the brief success, the long pitiable decline. In alternating chapters we see a Jack so badly beaten by life that it is only the force of his borrowed voice that pushes him once again upright.
"Being awake is hard work," this Kerouac complains. Being Jack seems to have been harder still. Hardest of all, perhaps, was to have been Jack's friend and minder Joe Chaput, whose sweetly puzzling self-denial serves as a countermotif to Jack's grandiose mother-centric shambling, especially during their modest attempt to make something of the Kerouac family origins, in Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec.
That Ray, in the opposite half, should be rediscovering, or at least appreciating anew, his own French-Canadian lineage is but one instance, and not the most subtle, of how parallels emerge. The details of Ray's childhood are as banal as the circumstances of Jack's domestic arrangements, his drinking, his television watching.
Ray gets the Wordsworthian squint: bright moments of pure immediacy (for example, singing "O Canada" to his dad "the day that Henderson scored his goal"). Jack gets the De Quincyish dilated stare - moments of abasement so dark they obscure the transition between past and present: "We were Shakespeare and Jesus Christ on the Cross and a man on the moon, but mostly we were just dust who wouldn't admit it ..."
But the reader knows, even as she ignores the knowledge, that the Kerouac chapters are the result, not the mere echo, of young Ray's education as a writer. They are proof of what, beyond the limits of the novel's chronology, he has become.
And though the reader may hesitate to identify author with antagonist, Ray with Robertson, she can still enjoy the irony of the undertaking: The boy who could not find the book of (Beat) life's meaning and, later, the adolescent who studied philosophy via "a 10-session TV course" are the creation of the same sophisticated mind that depicts, in rudely confident, eerily virtuosic prose, the sputtering out of whatever was flame-like in Kerouac's personality or, worse yet, soul
The Chathamite appears to be a simple entity when compared with the Roadster, his innocence so much easier to protect. But Ray has the ability, despite the missing book, to turn positively Jackish when events inspire him.
"Now I wanted to get Jack Kerouac drunk. Stay-up-all-night-tale-telling drunk. Grow-a-golden-gibbering-tongue drunk. See-hear-taste-smell-things-never-seen-heard-tasted-smelled-before drunk." So he does, with similarly abysmal effect, although, because this is Ray, it's funny, not sad or repellent.
Sex, too, has a similarly thwarted character: "The uninterrupted torture of adolescent horniness - basement couch bliss always. Just a little further, baby, just a little bit more away." But this is horniness, not alcoholic impotence. Hope, not despair.
"He could still remember when all he ever wanted to do was write one beautiful sentence." That's Kerouac thinking; it might also be author Robertson, whose modus scribendi has invariably been to build upward, from one solid beauty-seeking sentence to another, and who has never, it seems, been tempted by the "first thought best thought" dictum of Jack and his followers. (Not that the self-doubting Kerouac himself didn't revise: On the Road was put through several drafts.)
If Robertson, in the voice of his sombre second character, was wishing that he, too, could attain mastery "of my craft, of the form, of my mind," then the accomplishment so obvious here is all the reassurance he, or anyone else, should ever need.
—Bernard Kelly The Toronto Star
Is Jack Kerouac as a fictional character more interesting than Jack Kerouac as a writer? Ray Robertson sets out to achieve a boy's dream, cribbing for his own the title of the never-completed On the Road sequel, What Happened Later. Not your typical coming-of-age story, Robertson weaves a fictional Kerouac who is vividly alive - zipping drunkenly down the road in the passenger seat avec a too-full bladder - with the story of an ordinary adolescent in an ordinary town trying to get his hands on a copy of the American beat classic 20-plus years after the fact, and failing to do so. Using clear, lean prose with just enough of Jack's own spontaneity, Robertson makes the American icon fresh again, Canadian-style.
Robertson - the author of several novels, perhaps best known among them the Graham Parsons mash note Moody Food - is confident enough in his story to tell it simply, naming his protagonist after himself, Ray Robertson. The reader watches Ray grow up in Chatham, Ontario, as time swoops forward and back between the childhood and teenage years. Like Kerouac, who grew up "Ti Jean" in Lowell, Massachusetts, Robertson delves into his French-Canadian roots, and is always aware of his working-class status. The portrait he paints of southwestern Ontario - a terrain Robertson and I shared but never crossed paths in, separated by a few years and a few miles - is unblemished by flourish. What appears to be straight-ahead autobiography merges with the animated, well-researched sections portraying Kerouac on his very last road trip to Quebec in 1967, granting the reader a picture of a boy on his way up and a man on his way down.
Kerouac tells a hitcher who knows his work but doesn't recognize him that he's right, Jack Kerouac is dead: "I killed him myself last Thursday night. He forgot to say his rosary so I stabbed him in the heart with my Smith-Corona." The novel is full of such gems, a joy for any Kerouac or ex-Kerouac fan. A master of dialogue, Robertson's fallen king of the beats is fluid, real and written from a place of sincere love, not idolatry.
Subtle and more leisurely paced, the Ray chapters are no less entertaining, as he devotes his adolescence to Jim Morrison (who leads him to Kerouac), or philosophizes about hockey, football and jelly donuts, or simply observes the poetry of parental rituals: "My mother sucked a last suck from her Player's Light and pulled the ashtray out of the dash, crushed out her cigarette on the metal lip. It was full of mashed cigarette butts crowned with red lipstick kisses."
More a myth than an actual writer, Kerouac's ultimate legacy may be as a literary stage for teenagers - a gateway to other, more refined voices. By opening up the Kerouac myth, Robertson reclaims it from juvenilia, adding humour and a sly wink even as he allows time to stretch itself out on the blacktop. Perhaps Robertson's finest to date, it suggests that only two Canadians could understand the American road so well.
—Emily Schultz Eye Weekly
It's been a good month for fans of Beat writer Jack Kerouac, not to mention his publishers and, one suspects, his estate. With the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac's seminal autobiographical novel, On the Road, there have been dozens of re-examinations of its literary legacy in the media, a host of public events and, naturally, a good number of publishing opportunities for everything from a new edition of the book to first publication of the legendary "scroll" first draft (along with a handful of biographies, memoirs and self-help titles).
In danger of being lost in the hoopla, however, is a single, significant point: It's not about the book. Whatever the legacy of On the Road (and it's pretty clear that there is a legacy, though no one can quite agree on what it is), it has less to do with the literary merits of the book and more to do with its status as a perceived bellwether of freedom. You don't even need to have read On the Road for it to have changed your life. In fact, reading it might interfere with your preconceptions.
In his new novel, What Happened Later, Toronto author Ray Robertson confronts this aspect of the legend head-on. The result is a transfixing, brave and ultimately moving work that succeeds despite the significant hurdles it sets in its own path.
What Happened Later (Robertson borrows his title from the book Kerouac never wrote, a sequel to On the Road) interweaves two distinct storylines, both of them fictionalized versions of real events. The first strand follows Kerouac himself in the last year of his life, as he embarks on one final road trip. In the company of his friend Joe Chaput, Kerouac, by now a bloated, barely functioning alcoholic, sets off from his home in Lowell, Mass., to Quebec in search of his family's roots. Labouring under the weight of his celebrity and notoriety, Kerouac watches his life crumble in a series of hallucinatory flashbacks that punctuate the journey, and one comes to understand, acutely, why he drinks, and why he would be dead within a year.
The second strand of the novel is a fictionalized chronicle of Robertson's adolescence in small-town Chatham, Ont. From the moment he first hears of Kerouac and On the Road, Robertson falls under their spell. Though he's never actually read the book (and much of this part of the novel is concerned with his thwarted attempts to find his own copy), the young Robertson begins to shape his life in a quasi-Kerouacian mould, with explorations into spirituality, sexuality and recreational substance abuse.
As the two storylines build, they begin to reflect one another, commenting thematically back and forth. Robertson's attempt to find identity and a place in the world is mirrored and refracted by Kerouac's own continuing struggle, one he is clearly losing.
What Happened Later is an accomplished, compelling work that rings true in every sense of the word, with sharp characterization and acute insight. Most important, it deftly captures the spell of On the Road, how it can grip the imagination and change lives even at a distance. Anyone who has fallen under that spell (and I confess that I was one) will be able to relate.
—Robert J. Wiersema National Post
In alternating chapters, Robertson magically blends a fictional version of himself growing up with the story of a post-On The Road Jack Kerouac, by this time a drunken sponge on a freefall trip to the grave. In this, the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac's so-called bible, it's perhaps treasonous to admit I haven't read On The Road, but Robertson's great book doesn't require it.
—James MacGowan The Ottawa Citizen
Ray Robertson suffers from a bad case of envy for U.S. culture.
His 2002 novel Moody Food was heavily indebted to 1970s American alt-country icon Gram Parsons. And this time out he exhumes the legend of the iconic novelist Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road.
The Toronto writer's timing couldn't be better. With the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road this month, a great deal of attention has been directed at Kerouac.
A handsome commemorative edition of On the Road is available, plus an edition of the famous scroll on which it was written.
Kerouac had ancestral roots in Quebec and Robertson is not the first Canadian writer to turn his life into fiction. Kerouac inspired novels by Jim Christy (The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac) and Ken McGoogan (Visions of Kerouac: A Novel).
Robertson takes his title from the title Kerouac had chosen for the sequel to his revolutionary, fictional autobiography, a sequel he never got around to writing.
What Happened Later traces the arc of two parallel lives: one of them a promising coming-of-age story on the ascent, the other a sad, end-of-life story on the decline.
The latter is set in 1967, Canada's centenary. Kerouac is making a trip from his hometown of Lowell, a grubby mill town in Massachusetts, to his ancestral home of Riviere du Loup, in eastern Quebec -- ostensibly to do research for a book.
Robertson puts us in the back seat of the car driven by Joe, who against his better judgment, has agreed to drive his friend. (Ironically, Kerouac never learned to drive.)
Kerouac is a broken man and a spent artist. Booze and the drugs have taken their toll. He is a mere two years from the grave.
Robertson's achievement here is to paint a sympathetic portrait without whitewashing. Through Robertson, we gain insight into the deeply flawed man behind the famous writer who set the life-induced, pulsating rhythm that defined the Beat Generation.
Unfolding 15 years later, the coming-of-age story is about a working-class Chatham, Ont., teenager named Ray Robertson who falls under the spell of Jim Morrison and then learns through a paperback biography that the rock legend was influenced by Kerouac.
Ray doesn't actually read On the Road until he goes off to university in Toronto. At a used book sale, however, he picks up a tattered biography of Kerouac that sustains his adolescent imagination.
Only Robertson knows for sure how much of What Happened Later is autobiography. For readers, it doesn't matter. What does matter is the masterful way Robertson recalls in such loving detail life in small-town Ontario in the 1970s. His account is so vivid it's like looking at a photo album or a pictorial history.
Moreover, the character Ray is a very appealing creation.
Robertson successfully gives expression to the same kind of stream-of-consciousness writing that makes On the Road such an infectious, glorious and joyous trip.
Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid What Happened Later is that it does On the Road proud -- "dreaming in the immensity of it...just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in..."
—Robert Reid Kitchener-Waterloo Record/Guelph Mercury
A little while ago I saw and heard a singer with whose music I had only recently become acquainted. Although I am no longer young, popular music (if that is what this singer performs) can still sometimes change me. This particular singer's art haunts me even weeks after the evening on which I witnessed her performance. She materialised on my nervous system in a way that feels indelible. Hence, for me, Ray Robertson's recollection of how Jim Morrison's music affected him as a teenager rings true. Robertson's new book, What Happened Later, is full of gratitude and irony. The Dionysiac Morrison offers one focus for the play of these contrapuntal sentiments. Remarkably, Robertson's irony does not cancel his gratitude.
It was a stray remark from the lips of the dissipated rock god Jim Morrison that put into young Robertson's mind the idea of reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Robertson's own book takes its title from what would have been Kerouac's last project. With this gesture, Robertson makes a profound and energetically solacing point, a point that in some moods a person might even call "spiritual", if the word did not imply pallor and acquiescence-features of neither Robertson's syntax nor his subject matter. The aim of Robertson's narrative is alternately to trace his own coming of age in Chatham, Ontario (a place in which it was impossible to obtain a copy of On the Road), and to recount Kerouac's decline, manifest in a late visit to Quebec, the province from which his Massachusetts family stemmed. As Robertson's story develops, it reveals that growth and decline are not opposites, and that, moreover, in some real sense (such is the success of this work), Kerouac is not dead, not ruined, not exactly the react ionary, bigoted wreck of pathetic legend. Instead, with all his flaws, he still lives in Robertson's prose and in Robertson's reader. As for irony-Robertson revels in it, but with strange freedom from spite. His irony is sometimes furious; it is not petty. Robertson recounts, for example, the irony of Jim Morrison's worshipping Jack Kerouac: Kerouac despised what Morrison and his band stood for. And what Morrison and Kerouac would have made of Robertson is anybody's guess. It would depend, perhaps, on the phase of life in which one chose to consult them. But if there is an afterlife, and if it implies (as it surely ought to) a broadening of perspective, both men should be gratified. Robertson compounds honesty with love to make them memorable.
At first glance, the book may seem to be about squandered energies and annihilation, as well as about the limitations of small-town life in late 20th-century southwestern Ontario. But this assessment is off the mark. The youthful, theatrical cult of debauchery and death becomes, in Robertson, the instrument of growth and life. Vividly recollected catastrophe becomes the triumph of those who themselves "happen later". Robertson makes Kerouac live past and through his collapse; the memoirist regathers him and puts him back "on the road." Nietzsche wrote, "What does not kill me makes me stronger." Robertson's narrative takes Nietzsche's apophthegm and adapts it: "What kills those whom I love can make them and me stronger, even after their death-for love is stronger than death." At the heart of Robertson's book, for all its kinetics and anger and clowning, is an intensely moving insight: one man's sad end can be another man's beginning, without any admixture of meanness or competition. It is in this sense that all is forgiven. Moreover, there is nothing genetic about this, even metaphorically-Robertson is not to Kerouac as son to father. They are equals before history and eternity. Robertson's idea of eternity-or at least of history-comes to the fore when a friend of his youth, the son of a mortician, takes him to look at the body of a nun. What is heaven? The boys cannot believe in the nun's version. Instead, Robertson the writer offers a sort of astringent, cockeyed, eloquent heaven for Kerouac, who brought the good word to Robertson. Also occupying this heaven is the young Robertson.
Robertson excels at contrasts. Alcohol, for example, can be a weakness and a pleasure for the poor and rich alike. Kerouac is one kind of lush; with his cocktails, the suburban Ontario lawn king, Dr. Franklin, is another. Now and then I felt that Robertson's resentment did get the better of him. What might have counterbalanced the critique of Dr. Franklin is a perspective like John Cheever's. Such a perspective would have disclosed the magic in Dr. Franklin's world. (Besides which, Cheever had more than a touch of Kerouac & Co. in him, both as a writer and as a man.) Also, Robertson rushes sometimes to the polemical dismissal of some kinds of existence. Yet the professor John Berryman is as much god-awful fun as the barfly Jack Kerouac, in ways that are at once similar and discrepant. Of course, Robertson does register the truth that Kerouac was consciously complicit with what he claimed to despise. The writer at once marketed himself and did not market himself, caught not in the world of compromise bu t the limbo in which every human heart lives: half good and half bad-bad in some ways that qualify as good, good in some ways that qualify as bad.
So far, I have praised Robertson's writing rather abstractly. It is excellent in several respects. His phrasing is often striking. Kerouac perceives, in the company of a friend, that he has turned into a monologist: "Talking to himself. Talking to himself talking to Joe." A well-timed drink "flushed [Kerouac's] face phony healthy." And when you try to find a station agreeable to you, you are "making love to the radio dial." Robertson also has a light touch with symbolism. The bag attached to the side of a lawnmower always turns out to be heavier than expected. Such is the useless, eternally recurrent harvest of a suburban yard. Robertson's French-speaking grandparents give him a French-speaking G.I. Joe, and his distance from the francophone world is manifest in the way that this little soldier always plays the hateful role of "The Prisoner". Robertson knows that, when they finally get into their bathing suits and you get to see them, the people whom you hoped to find even more desirable in this costum e are often less so. Robertson shows a great tactical sense of drama and humour, as evidenced in a story about the adventures of a jelly donut in a spotless car. He gives a fantastically accurate catalogue of what you might find in a southwestern Ontario book sale in the 1970s or '80s (Irving Stone, Pearl S. Buck, Arthur Hailey, Anita Bryant-and then the revelation, Bertrand Russell). In the course of What Happened Later, the separate lives of Jack Kerouac and Ray Robertson become an allegory for what happens in a single person, all the time. "Jack Kerouac" and "Ray Robertson" are one. We die and are reborn, over and over. We perish in what feels to us to be squalor. Then we undergo resurrection from the ruins of a former self. Constitutionally we are phoenixes. Artworks are often the substance of the pyre from which we arise, not perfect by any means but "on the road" again, enjoying a view, a donut, a conversation, a daydream, a book, or a kiss. A figure such as Jim Morrison is deputed by fate to lead us into transformation, at our hazard, and at the hazard of those close to us. Is the hazard worth it? In Goethe's Faust, the Lord Almighty remarks of the tempter Mephistopheles:
I have never hated your kind.
Of all the spirits that try to destroy
This joker is by far my favourite.
Human beings quickly get too lazy.
They love nothing more than snoozing.
That's why I like giving them a friend
Who shakes them up and who, though a devil,
Is compelled to be constructive.
—Eric Miller Books in Canada