Books: Kerouac’s Small Saint

VISIONS OF GERARD by Jack Kerouac. 151 pages. Farrar, Straus. $3.95.

It is hard these days to evoke childhood’s lost garden of innocence when current fiction insists that there is no such thing and that the very young are very wicked, with tendencies to parricide and cannibalism. Thus it is both a pleasant and surprising experience to read Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard, which asserts the faith that a child has a better chance of being good than someone older who is already visited by corruption. Perhaps only someone known as a high-bellowing beatnik prose man, and thus a bit of a child himself, could have pulled off the unlikely feat of extorting tears for a dead child. The child is Gerard, doomed to sanctity in a New England tribe of boozing, brawling Canucks. He dies at nine, a neighborhood wonder, full of love for God, small animals and his mother. Kerouac’s feeling is genuine, and the self-indulgent gush of his prose is perhaps no worse than the pietistic style of those who have had to deal with real, grown-up saints.