What Happened Later by Ray Robertson
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.
Thomas Allen Publishers: 2007.
ISBN: 9780887622793. 327 pp.
SIGNED.
Hardcover. Very good+.