William S. Burroughs, Jr. (1947–1981)

I, probably like most people who've read this bk, read it b/c it was written by William S. Burroughs' son about drugs & their use & culture, etc. Like father, like son? I remember thinking it was fairly well written. Perhaps he cd've gone on to write many bks. But he didn't, only one more. What did he die of? Liver failure or some such, perhaps - a failure probably related to speed use. What kind of a person names their child after themselves? IMO, an asshole. That's like dooming yr child to being the next version of yrself. & it seems that that's somewhat what the more famous of the Burroughs father & son duo did. Doomed his son to being a drug reporter like himself. But not everybody's cut out for surviving such a lifestyle & Jr. died before his old man did. Still, reading "Speed" is probably just as important as reading his father's "Junkie". Let it be that he lived as intensely as he did so that post-mortem he can be appreciated.… (més)

Not the book its predecessor was (sadly), Kentucky Ham wanders quite literally all over the map. It does pick up where Speed left off, with Billy returning to Palm Beach after his near-disastrous adventure in New York; soon, however, he's arrested for passing a forged prescription and sent to the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky (a bleak facility which had first appeared in his father's debut novel Junky) to be "cured" of his drug addiction. A few months later, Billy finagles a transfer to an experimental school for disturbed teens, back in Florida; then the school's director ships him off to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. There's even a flashback to the brief period when Billy went to live with Burroughs Sr. in Tangier, but that just muddies the book's chronology.

Billy himself was not pleased with his second autobiographical novel (in a letter to his father, he wrote that "Kentucky Ham is so far from what I want to do that I gasp with horror at the mention of the words"). The structural difficulties he encountered are increasingly evident as the story plods along, eventually crowding half the book's action into an unfocused, gargantuan final chapter. But, being a big fan of the junior Burroughs, I reread it every now and then.

Sad, funny, hair-raising things do happen in Kentucky Ham (the most emotionally affecting moment occurs when Billy visits his ailing grandmother for the last time), but this book is apt to make the reader feel as scattered as Burroughs Jr. obviously was when he wrote it.… (més)

There aren't many valid comparisons that can be drawn between William S. Burroughs and his son. After all, the elder Burroughs had a decades-long career as a novelist and public figure, while Billy completed only two books and died in virtual obscurity at the age of 33. But he made those two books count, and if you're looking for the fresher voice, the more open and relatable one, it's no contest: Burroughs Jr. was the hands-down winner. Speed, a fascinating account of Billy's teenage odyssey from Palm Beach to New York City in search of a steady methamphetamine supply, is his masterpiece. Unique among most of the addled Beat pantheon, he could actually write; the narrative is as smooth and readable as the subject matter is abrasive and occasionally disturbing. (Had Jack Kerouac possessed any talent, this is the book he might have written.)

I'm a big fan of the senior Burroughs's early novels like Junky and Queer, and I admire him enormously for speaking out against the cruelty and dishonesty of the War on Drugs when no one else had the courage to take such a definite position. At the moment we could really use an incisive voice like WSB's to cut through all the propagandic hysteria surrounding the nonexistent "opioid crisis". But he concluded his career with dull, ineffectual revenge fantasies and self-pitying reflections on aging (which evidently drained him of the wherewithal to pity Billy or his mother, Joan Vollmer), making a book like The Western Lands an uphill slog indeed. There are no such problems with Speed, however: I find myself rereading it every few years, stunned by the immediacy of the writing. Long after his death, the damaged but triumphant humanity of William S. Burroughs Jr. lives on in these pages.… (més)