Get Home Free
A Novel
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
The chief chronicler of the Beat Generation portrays the hangover that followed the giddy early days of the movementin this poignant follow-up to Go
Dan Verger and May Delano share a loft in New York City, but the passion that brought them together has turned brittle and sour, much like the boozy parties and late-night discussions that so thrilled them a few years ago. The brightest lights of their circle have moved on—visionary poet David Stofksy to a job in advertising, novelist Gene Pasternak to Mexico—and Dan and May eventually decide to do the same, abandoning each other to return to their respective hometowns.
On the Connecticut seashore, Dan contemplates the trip to Europe that he has always promised himself, but finds his dissipated habits hard to break. Killing time with Old Man Molineaux, the charismatic town drunk, Dan recognizes what his life might look like in 30 years. Meanwhile, May returns to Louisiana and is surprised to discover Paul Hobbes, a New York friend, playing piano in a bar on the African American side of town. At a wild, drug-fueled party in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, May comes face-to-face with the complicated racial dynamics of the Beat movement.
Artful and authentic, melancholy yet tender, Get Home Free pays tribute to a generation that, in daring to break with the patterns of the past, profoundly influenced the future of American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Five years before Kerouac's On the Road, Holmes's novel Go (1952) introduced the kind of lives and themes that later would be called Beat. Get Home Free, first published in 1964 and long out of print, also portrays the desperate and dissipated youth that congregated in New York City in the '50s. The novel takes its title from the child's game of kick-the-can, where players scurry back to home base; only here, the participants are existentialist adults. Bohemians Dan Verger and May Delano break up and, in separate sections, we follow them on visits home, Dan to the Connecticut shore ``to come to terms with a stalled life,'' and May to Louisiana, where she confronts her past as a Southern belle. Dan and May gain self-confidence, and, eventually calmer, more sober, they both return to New York determined to forge ahead. In Holmes's world, where ``even the hopelessness becomes curiously moving,'' May and Dan succeed by recognizing that their talky search for all the answers about love and their times, initially inspiring, has become tiring and even deadly; they shut up and just live. Infused with the characteristic Beat rawness, at times the novel is painful to read. It also often crackles with social observations that still speak true today, and there are many fine set pieces that evoke the splendor of rural life and the angst of the urban. This honest, powerful book has the air of the epic and carries it well. Holmes died on March 30.
