Review by Booklist Review
Hanick's first book is a tightly braided inquiry into three radical acts: Jack Kerouac's frenzied writing of On the Road on a 120-foot-long scroll, gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim commissioning Jackson Pollock to paint the enormous abstract canvas known as Mural, and President Eisenhower's launching of the interstate highway initiative. All three converge in Hanick's home state, Iowa, where Mural ended up after Guggenheim inexplicably gave it to the University of Iowa's Museum of Art and where Kerouac's scroll landed for one stop on its cross-country tour via the highways Eisenhower envisioned. Hanick's research was avid and extensive, and in his sieving through all that he gleaned, he gravitates toward the unexpected and the poignant. We see Eisenhower painting, Kerouac confined to a naval hospital after running naked across a drill field, and Pollock babysitting for the offspring of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Hanick also mixes bits of woebegone autobiography with curious facts about concrete, stampedes, traffic, and the WPA, creating arresting juxtapositions in the mode of such kindred innovative essayists as John D'Agata, Ander Monson, and Lia Purpura.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Two coinciding exhibits at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 2005-the display of Jackson Pollock's sprawling canvas Mural and the manuscript scroll of Jack Kerouac's On the Road-are coupled with the museum's endangerment by a highway-channeled flood in 2008, inviting a tangle of philosophic reflections in this convoluted essay on art, commerce, and the building of America's interstate highway system. As interpreted by journalist and essayist Hanick, Pollock's development as a leading abstract expressionist, Kerouac's efforts to give voice to the restless spirit of his generation, and the Eisenhower administration's systematic plan to impose order on America's roadways were all boundary-pushing explorations of new frontiers. Though Hanick draws interesting parallels between these and other mid-20th-century cultural phenomena, his presentation of them in fragmented bursts of insight never coheres into a pattern with deeper meaning or significance. Hanick's narrative is a mix of fascinating historical details about his main subjects and sometimes frustratingly opaque flights of fancy. He alternates illuminating observations such as "the highway replaces space with motion," with indulgently abstract reflections: "The highway is a mediating skin. A place where our long daydream of ourselves might still be sustained." With its introduction of extraneous details from the author's personal life, this book is more a portrait of an imagination engaged than of the subjects that engaged it. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Imagine taking a road trip through Iowa with a chatty Jack Kerouac in the passenger seat and Dwight D. Eisenhower sitting impatiently beside a disinterested Jackson Pollock in the back seat.The personalities contained in this book are so large that they merit their own time and space. Of course, the lives of these three significant figures have been well-documented in numerous books. What Hanick (Creative Writing/Murray State Univ.) achieves is neither solely biography nor journalistic retelling but rather the intersection of these iconic American personalities threaded together with the author's coming-of-age. Hanick explores the mysterious presence of Jackson Pollock's watershed Mural at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and muses on his relationship to Kerouac's On The Road, the original scroll of which made a stop at the same museum. The author then mixes in Eisenhower and the executive weight behind the construction of the American Interstate Highway System. The idea here occasionally proves too ambitious, and the narrative is rife with expressionistic fragments and hanging conditionals that, on the road to poignancy, are often cut off in favor of a new idea or newly introduced information. The result feels incomplete or burdened by academic conjecture, though the fragmentary nature of the work gives it an element of mystery, and its subject matter alone is enough to keep readers interested. Hanick manages to braid moments of poetic confession and biographical detail with enough skill to paint a new perspective on the history of an American vanguard. As ambitious as our perennial desire to discover the road less traveled, as expressionistic as Pollock's action paintings, and as poetically driven as the Beat generation, this book is equal parts mystery, journalism, poetry and bildungsroman, ultimately in search of its own American voice. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
