When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.

Angels is lit up with the glare of 'scandal' and, in its exposure of the above members of the avant-beatnik world, may well wing its way to the wide audience the publisher anticipates.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Its impact (and best-seller possibilities) lie elsewhere, however, for here Kerouac spills the beans about the sex life, psychological hang-ups, and publicity maneuverings of himself, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs and Peter Orlovsky. Incredible the things I saw'), any number of atmospheric underlinings ('.it's a jazz-joint and beat generation madtrick'), and one frenetic, funny, free-associational scene after another. There are Heideggerian sub-titles (Desolation in Solitude, Desolation in the World), lots of vaudeville lyricism ('I'm gonna take it all in. It's a long prose-poem in the form of a memoir-novel, in which the author (calling himself, as he's done elsewhere, Jack Duluoz) explores three phases of his life: the Zen-seeker bit (camping out on mountain tops, awaiting the joyful-sorrowful illumination) then the Frisco-New York prelude to fame finally the after-effects of being immortalized by the Luce publications and further dizzy-dim wanderings through North Africa, Europe and America. Kerouac's Desolation Angels may be dealt with quickly.

Desolation angels book