The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Crimes of the Beats by the Unbearables reveiwed by Brian Lennon

The Unbearables. Crimes of the Beats. Autonomedia, 1998. 223 pp. Paper: $12.00.

By and large, the growing corpus of academic scholarship on the Beat writers has not been matched by writers’ own critical reappraisals of the American ’50s. Crimes of the Beats gives those years the attention they deserve, and its contributors take Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al. very seriously indeed, as measured by the harshness of their rebukes. In parodies, memoirs and feuilletons—some viciously dismissive, most confidently critical, and a few semi-reverent—such contemporary avant-gardists as Lynne Tillman, Ron Sukenick, Lance Olsen, and Sparrow reexamine the literary myth-making of the writers who rolled “along the highway of dreams,” as Tillman puts it in the voice of Kerouac, feeling “the cool American breeze rush crazily over my American skin.” Kerouac the egoist, Ginsberg the mercenary, and Burroughs the reptile take heavy blows here; Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima (whose erotic memoirs are parodied to devastating effect), and Amiri Baraka come up for pokes and jabs too. The tone is generally light—this is no manifesto—but a serious and considered critique of Beat ideals surfaces often enough amid the mockery. Those ideals were spontaneity (“I Tried to Write Spontaneous Prose but All I Ever Got Was Tired,” counters Carl Watson), sexual profligacy (“What if [Neal Cassady] wasn’t the greatest fast-speaking, bebop-loving, accelerator-pressing, woman-leaving hipster who ever lived?” asks Sparrow), and a romanticized Buddhism (“Transcending the ego,” Tom Savage observes of Kerouac’s dipsomania, “was not intended to mean destroying its container”). Perhaps the most potent revisioning in Crimes of the Beats, however, comes in the pieces, such as Tsaurah Litzky’s “Reflections on Beat Sexism,” that confront the all-too easy identification that a work such as On the Road offers to one half of its potential readership. [Brian Lennon]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Crimes of the Beats by the Unbearables reveiwed by Brian Lennon The Unbearables. Crimes of the Beats. Autonomedia, 1998. 223 pp. Paper: $12.00. By and large, the growing corpus of academic scholarship on the Beat writers has not been matched by writers’ own critical reappraisals of the American ’50s. Crimes of the Beats gives those years the attention they deserve, and its contributors take Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al. very seriously indeed, as measured by the harshness of their rebukes. In parodies, memoirs and feuilletons—some viciously dismissive, most confidently critical, and a few semi-reverent—such contemporary avant-gardists as Lynne Tillman, Ron Sukenick, Lance Olsen, and Sparrow reexamine the literary myth-making of the writers who rolled “along the highway of dreams,” as Tillman puts it in the voice of Kerouac, feeling “the cool American breeze rush crazily over my American skin.” Kerouac the egoist, Ginsberg the mercenary, and Burroughs the reptile take heavy blows here; Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima (whose erotic memoirs are parodied to devastating effect), and Amiri Baraka come up for pokes and jabs too. The tone is generally light—this is no manifesto—but a serious and considered critique of Beat ideals surfaces often enough amid the mockery. Those ideals were spontaneity (“I Tried to Write Spontaneous Prose but All I Ever Got Was Tired,” counters Carl Watson), sexual profligacy (“What if [Neal Cassady] wasn’t the greatest fast-speaking, bebop-loving, accelerator-pressing, woman-leaving hipster who ever lived?” asks Sparrow), and a romanticized Buddhism (“Transcending the ego,” Tom Savage observes of Kerouac’s dipsomania, “was not intended to mean destroying its container”). Perhaps the most potent revisioning in Crimes of the Beats, however, comes in the pieces, such as Tsaurah Litzky’s “Reflections on Beat Sexism,” that confront the all-too easy identification that a work such as On the Road offers to one half of its potential readership. [Brian Lennon]

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