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Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals)

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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!

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.

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.

Anyone who loves Jack Kerouac's recreations of 1940s America - from Times Square to rail yards to jazz clubs to mom's kitchen - will feel right at home with Ted Pelton's Malcolm & Jack. That's not because Pelton mimics Kerouac's style, but rather, because he succeeds at revisiting the mood, the ecstatic joy bubbling beneath all the state-issued gray flannel. Pelton spends equal time with Kerouac, Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, and an engagingly perverse subject from the Kinsey report. He also speculates on how these characters may have passed each other along their separate paths "back in the day." In short, Pelton spends time with some of the true-life genius creative and political characters (the word "criminals" is used in Pelton's title with a wink - although the incarcerations these people faced were very real) and delves into their lives in ways their own works - or even straight biography - never could. This is Grade A historical fiction for Beat, Jazz, and 1940s hipster aficionados.

Pelton's novel begins with a seemingly simple quip about setting, "New York is a 40's town." One instantly thinks of black and white film clips of USO shows, GI's on leave, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie singing "Dancing `round Hitler's Grave," and so on and so on. But this is not that New York and this is not about the Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac we know either. This is a novel about the other side of life, the criminal. The opposite of all we know, or better, seem to recall. The story is the Yang to the fictional/ mythical Ying of our greatest generation. One can instantly name the deeds of both Kerouac and X, however those people developed from the actions out of which these characters are born. Pelton easily eschews hard fact for whatever fits into his story (history) and provides us with a mixed portrait of a time when America is at war and our heroes are eagerly avoiding going to that war. A time when Billy Holiday is in jail, Kinsey is conducting his sexual research and homosexuality is without a doubt as immoral as it is illegal. They did happen didn't they? The myth we now understand, stand under is shattered in deft prose, a wandering style that is tight as it is loose. Pelton recreates the America that one wants to forget. The criminal past we wish to move away from and embrace our amber waves of grain. We understand Jack through his penis and Malcolm through his greed. We get a glimpse into the sex in a time when sex seemingly didn't happen. We are witness to male rage in many forms, going as far as attempted murder to keep sexual secrets secret. These all make up the great cancer no one talked about. Pelton does a cleaver dance and keeps this from a conformist's anti-hero novel, a coming of age blah or a traditional historical novel. This is something new and very exciting. I urge you to read this book!

MALCOLM & JACK AND OTHER FAMOUS AMERICAN CRIMINALS is time-lapse journey to post World War II America, a period that left the people of the world dissociative, confused, in pain, and in search for meaning after an event that all but completely eroded our psyches. Ted Pelton has transported us to that time and by populating his novel with characters the likes of Jack Kerouac and the rise of Beat poetry, Detroit Red (aka Malcolm X) and the beginnings of Black Power, Billie Holiday (Lady Day) and her battle (and imprisonment) with drug abuse almost shuttering her gift of song, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and their confrontation with sexual variations, Alfred Kinsey and his frankness in altering human sexuality, to name only a few.

Pelton takes these famous icons and blends them together to wave a story that provides an understanding of the impetus for everything that was new in America - from the new music, to the new economy, to the McCarthy era of terrorism, to the changes in the visual and musical and written arts. Few authors have been able to recreate this inordinately strange atmosphere that still felt the debris of atomic bombs and the threat that America was as vulnerable as the rest of the globe. But Pelton ties all this somewhat disparate characters together so well that it feels like accurate history rather than the author's permission to alter facts for the sake of molding a memorable novel. It is written in the manner in which the characters spoke, it illuminates on every page, and it drives the reader steadily toward the ending that makes us realize the special heritage that resulted form a World War aftermath. History was changed - and so are we, the readers. Grady Harp, July 11

Don't be shy about this book...it breaks down barriers between journalism and fiction, but is never confusing. Sometimes it feels like personal interviews or memoir, as it really gets into the minds of Billie Holiday, Malcolm X, and others. If you are interested in the legends and real truths of these great American heroes, buy the book!

Ted Pelton's newest book, Malcolm & Jack, is a tour de force in experimental form, and a pleasure to read. The author knows his history well, and through his unique, hybrid form of narrative, takes us on an archetypal journey through a (quasi) American history peopled by some of the most fascinating characters of the twentieth century.

This book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in the Beats, jazz, Jack Kerouac, or Malcolm X!

The debut novel of by Ted Pelton, Malcolm And Jack And Other Famous American Criminals is an intriguing merger of fact and fiction portraying the pop culture lives of Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac in the form of an "alternative history". Intricately detailing the short-lived friendship between two high-school drop-outs, Malcolm And Jack opens readers to the reality of the post-war fifties and the pretentious mentality of Americans as the era neared revolution. An original, superbly crafted, imaginative novel, Malcolm And Jack is very strongly recommended as an engaging (albeit fictitious) tale in which several of America's great historical icons meet and mingle with one-another.