Word: boye
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When he was a boy, Kerouac lived in the three-decker tenements of Lowell, Mass., then a booming textile and industrial city. He was very close to his parents -- especially to his mother -- who were French-Canadian immigrants. When Jack received an athletic scholarship to Columbia, his mother sighed with relief because her son would be "living with the people he should have grown up with...
...unseen since the early days of Jonathan Winters. "Earthquake!" he will yell, jumping up and down, before he rushes out to the audience to heckle himself. Within seconds, he is back onstage, giving a beautiful basso profundo rendition of Shakespeare, followed by rapid-fire impressions of a go-go boy, Long John Silver and characters from a Japanese science-fiction movie. "It's madness all around," he explains. "But the center is very calm, like the center of a hurricane...
...lovable kiddie show host, says: "Welcome to my neighborhood. Let's put Mr. Hamster in the microwave oven. O.K.? Pop goes the weasel!" Other bit players include Ernest Sincere, a redneck used-car dealer; Joey Stalin, a Russian stand-up comic; Little Sherman, a perverse little boy; and Walt Buzzy, a gay director. Grandpa Funk, based on an old wino Williams once saw in San Francisco, always appears at the end of the show. Clicking his gums and speaking in a raspy high-pitched voice, the old codger explains he used to be a stand-up comedian with a television...
Life clearly has a lesson in store for Haye; but when it comes, it is particularly senseless and cruel. A boy idly throws a rock at a train; a window smashes and Haye, sitting behind it, is blinded...
With his hero's accident, Green transforms the novel from a typical schoolboy memoir into a remarkably mature meditation on losses and gains. He slips easily into the minds and emotions of characters around Haye: the boy's stepmother, an old nanny, the sad, slightly vulgar daughter of an unfrocked clergyman. All, in varying ways, must struggle to cope with the presence of a person to whom the intolerable has happened. He too must struggle to grow into his tragedy...