An episode in Kerouac’s “Visions of Gerard.” Gerard, the narrator’s saintly older brother, rescues a mouse from a trap and brings it home to nurse to health. What gives this story its impact are four subsequent events: (1) the family cat eats the mouse, leaving only its tail; (2) the father attempts to explain to the naive Gerard why this has happened; (3) the normally sweet-tempered Gerard berates the cat ferociously; (4) the narrator compares Gerard’s scolding of the cat to Jesus throwing the money-lenders out of the temple-- uncharacteristic but justified demonstrations of anger in both cases. This comparison is “over-the-top,” and indeed the whole episode is sentimentalized. The entire book is written as hagiography. Yet certain details—the cat’s tail left behind, the ambivalent reactions of the adults to the incident, the narrator’s adult recreation and re-interpretation of a childhood memory—are highly memorable.

There is a section of “Mexico City Blues,” thirteen or fourteen poems around the middle of the book, that recreates Kerouac’s childhood experience with startling vividness, and much less sentimentality. The doggerel in this book is often hard to take, but in these poems it suddenly becomes a poetic resource of great power. It is as though he had to write 80 or 90 poems of noticeably lesser quality to get to this central section. Yet we cannot edit out the unevenness of this book, since it is essential to Kerouac’s practice of writing.