Description:

A novel
Jack LaFleur was a self-destructive, Kerouac-style wanderer, a secret poet and, according to his own legend, a bit character in Kerouac's last great novel, Big Sur. At the end of the Sixties, Jack married Carrie Anderson and attempted to settle down in the American suburbs to raise a family. But he could achieve only an uneasy truce with the land of shopping malls and frontage roads, and he died years later a bitter and frustrated alcoholic.

When Jack's youngest son Theo impulsively hitchhikes across the country to visit the grandfather he's never met, he discovers a secret Jack never revealed to his family: Jack was a poet whose work was thought destroyed, but is now a valuable commodity in a mini-renaissance of Beat poetry. And so it is that Jack will always be the greatest force his family knows.