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Beatitude, Larry Closs
Product Description
Beatitude
Larry Closs
New York City, 1995: Harry Charity is a sensitive young loner haunted by a disastrous affair when he meets Jay Bishop, an outgoing poet and former Marine. Propelled by a shared fascination with the unfettered lives of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, the two are irresistibly drawn together, even as Jay's girlfriend, Zahra, senses something deeper developing.
Reveling in their discovery of the legendary scroll manuscript of Kerouac's On the Road in the vaults of the New York Public Library, Harry and Jay embark on a nicotine-and-caffeine-fueled journey into New York's smoky jazz joints, dusty rare-book shops and thriving poetry scene of slams and open-mike nights.
An encounter with "Howl" poet Allen Ginsberg shatters their notions of what it means to be Beat but ultimately and unexpectedly leads them into their own hearts where they're forced to confront the same questions that confounded their heroes: What do you do when you fall for someone who can't fall for you? What do you do when you're the object of affection? What must you each give up to keep the other in your life?
Beatitude features two previously unpublished poems by Allen Ginsberg.
Larry Closs is a New Yorker who often wanders far from home.
Reviews:
"An endearing debut novel about aspects of love and connection set against the continuing legacy of the Beat Generation." —Shelf Awareness
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Product Reviews
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Sharp, Smart, Contemporary
Posted by Dr. Simon Warner, editor of Howl for Now and Lecturer, Popular Music Studies, School of Music, Unive on 3rd Oct 2011
Larry Closs’s Beatitude is a sharp, smart novel with a human voice and some neat interweavings of memory and the present. Set in the recent past in a largely gay milieu in the media world of Manhattan, it avoids the usual posing or pretentiousness of fiction located in that hip, midtown mode. Rather, it is a story whose narrator has warmth and it is driven by a dialogue that is convincing and engaging. But the book is more than just a tale of quotidian romance in the upper storeys of a bejewelled urban isle—it also makes regular reference to the Beat Generation writers which drew me in still further. It opens as Harry, the storyteller, and his friend Jay go searching on a grail-like mission to view Jack Kerouac’s legendary Original Scroll for his most famous novel On the Road and the book proper then commences with an almost direct reference to the opening lines of Kerouac’s own signature text. Yet Beatitude, which takes its title from Kerouac’s extension of the word Beat to embrace notions of the saintly and also incorporates some unpublished fragments of poetry by that other Beat giant Allen Ginsberg in its pages, is more than a mere derivative homage. It is an authentic contemporary account, enlightened by appealing Beat details, but its main strength is in its ability to convey plausible conversations between its believable dramatis personae.
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Authentic & Thrilling
Posted by Conor Grennan, author of Little Princes on 22nd Sep 2011
“There is a thrill when you read something so real, so true, that you’re never taken out of the moment by a contrived line or joke. You’re there, in that moment with the characters, living that life. That’s why we read in the first place. Books like this should be recognized and celebrated for that."
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Transcendent
Posted by David Amram, composer, conductor, musician on 22nd Sep 2011
“A daring, honest writer with a gritty urban flair, who brings the reader into the new worlds he has created.”
