That Isn't Writing; It's Typing

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Penguin Classics

Well, hipsters, I have finally read Kerouac's classic post-war American novel. It took me the better part of a week to get through it and, to be candid, I'm unsure if it was worth the effort. I didn't understand a damn thing. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I was definitely expecting it to blow me away and, well, it didn't.

For the uninitiated, Kerouac's story (told in a sort of groovy stream-of-consciousness) is narrated by Sal Paradise, a fledgling student/writer, who likes jazz, drugs and very young women. Sal yearns to live in a world without rules and one of the ways in which he expresses his rebelliousness is to take to the road. With very few dollars in his pocket, Sal travels across America -- meeting up with friends, making it with girls, and generally seeking out the margins of society. Central to the novel is Sal's friendship with the iconic Dean Moriarty. Dean is a drug-addled, two-timing con man who is unable to commit to anything but the vision he has of himself. He is altogether unlikeable, yet infinitely interesting and Sal is drawn to him despite the terrible things that he does.

Why did I have such a problem with this novel? Maybe because Sal's celebration of "life on the road" was often punctuated by dependence on the very conventions that he sought to reject. His adventures (unlike Dean's) seem little more than an occasional foray into a forbidden world. He always had a safety net (his aunt in New Jersey, his GI benefits) and it seemed that while he tried to live on the edge, it was always a low risk proposition. Sal was, what my friends in the 80s would have called a "poser"; a watcher who collected someone else's stories and tried to live them as if they were his own.

Putting my dislike of the characters aside, Kerouac's writing is brilliant and the novel is worth reading if only for the beauty of his prose. I came across a couple of new (I guess old!) names for certain drugs in the book and I have to give him props for his use of the word "hincty." And no, I'm not going to tell you what it means. Three juke joints out of five.