Jack Kerouac's writings, read as a project of beatitude lost, found, or at least quested for, exists between the poles (as Paul Giles has so finely elaborated in "American Catholic Arts and Fictions") charged with an "ethnic plenitude lost" (which the Franco-American Catholicism of Lowell, Massachusetts stood for) (408); and "the final plenitude of confessional revelation" (416) he strove towards as novelistic language via the linotype rolls of writing "On the Road" or the fitful reversions of "Big Sur."In "Big Sur," the Zen Buddhism of mountain-minded emptiness so prominent in "Dharma Bums" or the notebooks of "Some of the Dharma" or the poetic experiments in consciousness of the Mexico City Blues gives way to some kind of alcohol-drenched counter-conversion back to the sacramentalism of his youth, as in this fitful scene in the dark night of Pacific privacy. "I lie there in cold sweat wondering what's come over me for years my Buddhist studies and pipesmoking assured meditations in emptiness and all of a sudden the Cross is manifested to me" (Big Sur, 205; Giles, 412). This sense of conversion to a post-Catholic beatitude may have pervaded everything Kerouac wrote, early and late. As ti jean put it in the clunky autobiography Vanity of Dulouz, he calls himself "one of the world's secret Jesuits, everything I do is based on some kind of proselytization" (Giles, 422). All the Dharma Bum had quested for was to write about Jesus, Giles shows, the sacramentalism of the holy name even when displaced into the music and prayers of Charley Parker.Paul Giles has written a sublime study in this capaciously learned and exacting text: writers like Kerouac, Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Donleavy, Mary McCarthy, film makers like Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Altman are made to resonate and refract a wry sacramentalism, a pithy analogical poeticism, that drenches the everyday materialism of capitalism in the auras of beatitude lost and found. Another America is delivered up, one closer to what Philip Roth calls, and examines in "American Pastoral," "the indigenous American berserk" than to the worship of Empire, the gospel of wealth, and modes of militarized domination: an America on the road towards plentitudes of beatitude to use a Beat pun.