Ten years in its research and writing, Malcolm & Jack is a wonder of recent American fiction: a novel that simultaneously introduces a powerful new voice and speaks powerfully about recent US history and the weight of empire. Fast, hypnotic, and heartfelt, Malcolm & Jack somehow manages to be frenzied and reflective, factual and speculative, all at once. A wild dash through an alternate American history. - George Saunders, author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.
Malcolm & Jack (And Other Famous American Criminals)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Malcolm & Jack is a moving, hip, and complex journey into not only American cultural, social, and political history, but also into the meaning of history itself. --American Book Review
An audaciously entertaining and insightful creation myth about the genesis of the late 20th century's counterculture and political liberation movements in the so-called birth of the cool in New York City jazz clubs at the end of World War II and dawn of the bebop era.... The overwhelming strength of this novel lies in its ability to dramatize the precise moments in consciousness when both Malcolm Little and Jack Kerouac cease to be criminals and become visionaries instead. --The Buffalo News
At all times Pelton's work is filled with political saavy, an empathy for societies' outcasts, and a frustrated awareness of the writer's limited ability to effect change upon the events he or she records. Malcolm & Jack is not the book you might expect it to be.... Instead, with immense talent, Pelton has attempted to weave implicit cultural critique, reflective internal monologue, three love stories, and a whole bunch of well-wrought character sketches into a series of progressing narratives that harmonize as much as they juxtapose. --Jacket Magazine (Australia)
An audaciously entertaining and insightful creation myth about the genesis of the late 20th century's counterculture and political liberation movements in the so-called birth of the cool in New York City jazz clubs at the end of World War II and dawn of the bebop era.... The overwhelming strength of this novel lies in its ability to dramatize the precise moments in consciousness when both Malcolm Little and Jack Kerouac cease to be criminals and become visionaries instead. --The Buffalo News
At all times Pelton's work is filled with political saavy, an empathy for societies' outcasts, and a frustrated awareness of the writer's limited ability to effect change upon the events he or she records. Malcolm & Jack is not the book you might expect it to be.... Instead, with immense talent, Pelton has attempted to weave implicit cultural critique, reflective internal monologue, three love stories, and a whole bunch of well-wrought character sketches into a series of progressing narratives that harmonize as much as they juxtapose. --Jacket Magazine (Australia)
About the Author
Ted Pelton is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Isherwood Fellowships in Fiction. He lives in Buffalo, NY, with his wife Susan, where he is a Professor at Medaille College and the Director of the fiction press, Starcherone Books.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dazzling Dance Through a Signature Era,
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This review is from: Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Paperback)
The 1940s laid the groundwork for America in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. WWII led to a generation of victors that created the American middle class. But beneath the prosperity and cultural posturing was an underbelly of dissatisfaction and uncertainty that helped shape later periods. Jazz, drug use, the beginnings of sexual liberation, alienation and rebellion, road-tripping, the beginning of the unraveling of acceptance of racial segregation -- all had roots in the period re-created in Ted Pelton's Malcolm & Jack. Using Malcolm X (when he was Detroit Red --nee Malcolm Little) and Jack Kerouac underpin the novel, which weaves through the lives of "other criminals" -- from Lady Day to Ginsberg to Burroughs to Kinsey -- to reveal a host of "other" Americas yet to rise in the collective consciousness. A dazzling debut novel!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
DeLillo meets Tarantino,
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This review is from: Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Paperback)
This is a compelling and creative novel that explores the early days of the Beat Generation. By coincidence, I began reading this book just before the excitement erupted around the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the release of its original "scroll". The timing was perfect for me because Malcolm and Jack colored in the landscape of the time period in which On the Road was written and helped me to put Kerouac's work in context as well as to understand what was so exciting about the Beats.
Malcolm and Jack is set at the end of WWII in the USA, when young adults in America needed to release their pent up energy from the enormous weight they carried for the war, and before the social and sexual repression that 1950's McCarthyist America brought with it. This release found its voice in a new sexuality, the creation of Be Bop Jazz, the invention of Beat poetry and literature, as well as drug exploration, among other things. Pelton explores all of these in this novel. The premise of the book is both unusual and well suited to the subject matter. The main characters in the book are Jack Kerouac and Malcolm X (when he was a young man called Detroit Red); but other key characters include: Billie Holiday, William S. Burroughs, Alfred Kinsey (of the Kinsey sex report), Allen Ginsberg, Edith Parker, and others. Pelton imagines and explores moments when these characters come together, many of which are built around documented events of the time: the murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, the surprisingly harsh incarceration of Billie Holliday for drug abuse, interviews done to assemble the Kinsey report, etc. The resulting novel made me think: Don DeLillo meets Quentin Tarantino. Although it is not clear that the famous contemporaries in Pelton's novel ever met in real life, Pelton brings them together to examine their implications to the time period as well as to explore how these characters would eventually evolve. In a sense, he used the famous characters we know as archetypes to better understand the motivations of the Beats. Pelton does a brilliant job of adopting the voices of the various characters and evokes the time period flawlessly. This book is set before my time, but reading took me back to that generation at a crucial inflection point in our modern history. I felt like I could smell the mixture of gabardine, perfume, cigarettes and sen-sen, all the while listening to Bird or Dizzie bopping in the background. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the voices of our history,
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This review is from: Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Paperback)
This carefully crafted tale begs to be read aloud. The hipster rhythms, the delicious slang, the blend of narrative styles and formats. And the voices, everywhere the voices of our history. Read the voices aloud while listening to the musicians that frequent these pages. The sharply etched scenes resonate with the tensions of the era: race, class, and sex; power, art and politics. All of them crimes, when done right. If you know the period, Pelton plays an inspired improvisation. If you're too young to remember, Pelton will make you want to hear more.
A solid work by a rising young novelist who promises to tell us many more such fascinating stories.
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