Every once in a while a book comes along that seems to symbolize all that is wrong with the publishing industry (if not the world of art and culture at large). There are books that are actually so ‘bad’ that their publication creates something not just worthless but actually harmful to society. You’re a Genius All the Time, by Chronicle Books, Regina Weinreich and the so-called Jack Kerouac Estate, is just such a book.

That such a book would be published under the name of a great writer forty years posthumously is sad and disturbing, but hardly surprising for an industry that will do anything to make a buck.

To be clear, however, You’re a Genius All the Time by Jack Kerouac is not really a book “by” Jack Kerouac at all. Not even the introduction to the book, which attempts to justify the publication, presents any evidence that Kerouac had any intention of making this book. You’re a Genius All the Time is an exploitation of Jack Kerouac, a waste of both the reader/buyer’s time and money. Indeed, it is indicative of all that is wrong with an industry intent on destroying itself.

To begin with, You’re a Genius All the Time breaks what should be the golden rule of publishing: to offer the public something new. The content of this book, at least all of the text composed by and attributed to Kerouac, has been published at least twice before in its entirety. It was published first in the late 1950’s in Evergreen Review, a magazine that championed “Beat” literature, and again on just three pages (483-485) of Viking’s The Portable Jack Kerouac published in the 1990’s.

The two brief “essays” in You’re A Genius All the Time are actually just parts of a letter Kerouac wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1953, after Ginsberg and Willliam S. Burroughs asked Kerouac to explain his method of writing. The request from Ginsberg and Burroughs came immediately after Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans, an experimental novel written in 72 hours without sleep. Rather than being a final exposition on his method and beliefs, the text in You’re a Genius All the Time probably explains Kerouacs method of writing The Subterraneans more than anything else. Besides, as Ann Charters writes in The Portable Jack Kerouac, “Kerouac was interested in writing, rather than in writing about writing, and he made few efforts to explain or theorize about his work.” Kerouac’s statement, or statements, about writing came in his novels and poetry written over many years, not in a single letter written before fully developing his voice as an artist.

You’re a Genius All the Time also reproduces a small selection of photographs provided by the Jack Kerouac Estate that, sadly, reinforce the late 1950’s media-generated image of Kerouac as a reckless, undisciplined, drunken buffoon. Nearly half of the photos reproduced show Kerouac either in the act of drinking or appearing drunk. None of the photos are even credited as being made in 1953, the year Kerouac wrote the text. We see in these photos the post-fame Kerouac, the easily digestible and simplistic image that chroniclers like Fred McDarrah and Larry Keenan have made careers out of.

The only seemingly new material in this book is the introduction by Regina Weinreich, apparently the preferred scholar of the Kerouac Estate. This is, if anything, a book by Regina Weinreich and the Kerouac Estate published by Chronicle Books and sold on the back of the dead artist. You’re a Genius All the Time, I beg, should never sit on any bookshelf alongside The Town and the City, On the Road, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Mexico City Blues, Book of Dreams, Tristessa, Visions of Cody, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, Visions of Gerard, Desolation Angels, Satori in Paris, Pic, and/or Vanity of Duluoz, the books that Jack Kerouac actually wrote himself and published (or at least planned during his lifetime).

The exploitation comes to feel even more nauseating when you read Kerouac, seeing how personal his artistic expression was, and how forthright his revelations were about the intimate details of his life. He wrote about his experiences for the sake of the integrity of his art, not to cash in or become an art star.

The last book Kerouac wrote before he died in 1969, Vanity of Duluoz, recalls his life and experiences as a teenager in Lowell, Massachusetts, and as a young student-athlete at Columbia University in New York City. It is tragic to imagine, the artist ravaged by alcohol, drugs, and depression, reflecting on his promising youth before it had all gone awry:

“But I still was a victim, went back to Ozone Park with Ma, she did her spring housecleaning (the old man gone, clean the house, drive the Celtic ghosts out) and I settled down to write, in solitude, in pain, writing hymns and prayers even at dawn, thinking “When this book is finished, which is going to be the sum and substance and crap of everything I’ve been thru throughout this whole goddam life, I shall be redeemed.”

Vanity of Duluoz is a beautiful book, a painful bit of memoir that completes a lifelong autobiographical masterwork Kerouac himself referred to as the Legend of the Duluoz or The Duluoz Legend. It was his story, his experiences, his real life. Jack Kerouac died at the age of 47, but managed to finish his life’s work. You’re a Genius All the Time is NOT by Jack Kerouac, despite what this book advertises. In this book Jack Kerouac has not been redeemed but exploited.

It’s not surprising that the publishers, intellectuals, and estate managers don’t understand their mistake. They are the establishment that Kerouac railed and wailed against, the establishment that represented everything wrong with art and literature during his lifetime. Jack Kerouac was not a drunken buffoon, nor a primitive and undisciplined genius spewing forth art like so much vomit or semen. Jack Kerouac was an inimitable genius, but it is not surprising that they don’t get it.