James Atlas, The Atlantic Tender and complex.

Doctorow Johnson, who was living with Kerouac when the novel that made him famous came out, has given us in Minor Characters a dispassionate portrait of a time that has since become a literary myth. a first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad. The Philadelphia Enquirer The love story of Joyce from the upper westside who journeys to the village on the subway, putting on a pair of copper earrings en route, and Jack, the confused, mother-tied, suddenly famous road poet from Lowell, Massachusetts. Seymour Krim, The Washington Post MINOR CHARACTERS is an avowedly nostalgic portrait that captures the excitement, the strangeness and the often misdirected and destructive energy of those lost days. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times Joyce Johnson hands over to us the safe-deposit box that contains the lost, precious scrolls of the New York '50s. Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times has brought to life what history may ultimately judge to have been minor characters, but who were to her own generation major enough to shape its consciousness. taking these two themes, she merges them into the idea of 'minor characters,' those people who live just as intensely or more so than those who are defining 'what's going on,' but who still, under these inaccurate definitions, come in as minor characters. But she's also writing her own biography and summation of the times. Sure, she's writing a memoir of the '50s, the 'Beat Generation' and Kerouac in particular. What Joyce Johnson is doing here, then, is several things.

Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson