Review » On The Road, by Jack Kerouac » (Reviewed by Wil C. Fry)

Full Title: On The Road
Author: Jack Kerouac
Year: 1957
Genre: Travel fiction
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN 0-14-004259-8 (Trade paperback)
Wikipedia page
Author’s Wikipedia Page

It took me a while, but I finally realized why my former managing editor Karen Anson recommended this book to me, and indeed bought me this copy for Christmas 2003. Now I grieve that I waited 15 years to read it.

As I started the book, my thoughts and opinions (about the book) were all negative. “He’s a horrible writer; this is hogwash; I probably won’t even finish it.” I suppose I kept reading out of morbid curiosity. Eventually I got into its rhythm. I tried to see the world of late 1940s America through the eyes of the only people I’ve known who lived through it — my grandparents. But none of what I knew about them and their toils fit the narrative; the closest I could get was my father’s father (A.W. Fry, who was born six years before Kerouac and died six years after him), the only one of four grandparents I can picture even occasionally getting loud, smoking cigarettes, and drinking through the night — though I can’t picture him experimenting with the other drugs mentioned in the book. No, no one I’ve ever known, or even heard of, was anything like the people in Kerouac’s book.

Except me. It hit me about halfway through why Karen Anson suggested I read it.

I remember I was telling her about my life in Arkansas — previous to coming to work for her at the small-town newspaper in Oklahoma. I was telling her about my poverty, my search for love, my pulling away from religion and exploring all other philosophical avenues, and how I took a year off work to get my head together and write, staying up many nights to drink, play billiards, talk with friends, and so on. How I’d experimented with one substance or another, trying to kill the pain, or feel the pain, or understand the pain or lack thereof and what meaning all of this gives to the universe and my life specifically. I told her one day the driver’s window in my 1974 Monte Carlo had shattered when I closed the door in a movie theater parking lot, but I just walked inside and saw the movie, and a few months later the rear window shattered when a teenage driver ran a red light just after I did and bumped my back end with his front end but I just made sure he was okay and then headed out to wherever I was headed that day — when winter came I still hadn’t replaced the windows but wanted to make a road trip to see friends and a sister in Missouri so I just drove up there all bundled up with the 20-degree air whipping through the car as I went through the night. A toll booth lady said I looked cold and I told her the windows were permanently down so she gave me a scarf and I went on. And how I went to a friend’s apartment one day but when I came back outside my car was gone because the apartment manager had thought it was abandoned and called a tow truck — but I didn’t realize that because no one told me so I thought it had been stolen; I reported it stolen to the police but they never found it. It was a month later when the salvage yard called me asking me to come get it (they wanted about five times what the whole car was worth), so I signed over the title to them.

And she said something like: “You remind me of Kerouac.” I had never heard of him, but she had grown up in the 1960s and considered herself the rural, Catholic version of a “flower child”, so she had indeed read Kerouac. I had never heard of the “Beat Generation” or any of the other writers she mentioned easily by name from that era. But she had read samples of my poetry before hiring me, and listened to the way I talked, and what I talked about, and she saw something in there. On a side note, the first question she asked in my interview for the job of staff writer was “Are you in a gang?” — because I didn’t fit the stereotype of someone who might want a white collar job in a small town, with my lengthy hair and bandanna wrapped around my head.

But back to this book. It’s a head trip. It takes you to a different place and a different time with different people. Okay, really they’re the same people. I wouldn’t recognize them standing in front of me and probably wouldn’t understand a single thing they said or know any of the names they named, but if someone passed out the cigarettes and put on a tune and poured some shots in someone’s basement or a run-down back-alley bar or in the middle of a road trip and we all started talking about the universe and they way life gets you down and you had to skip town because you missed the rent too many times, sleeping in friends’ back rooms or on strangers’ sofas — if this happened, then we and they would slowly come to recognize one another, much like I began to recognize an earlier version of myself in these stories.

And just reading it makes you feel like you’re partly drunk but also on speed and have gone without sleep for a couple of weeks and maybe just maybe nothing really matters because we’re all just trying to make it and looking for “IT” — and everything is going to be fine in the end. Except at the very end, when it ends, and then it doesn’t matter if anything is fine or not.

On the whole, I won’t recommend this book to anyone who hasn’t already read it; I can’t think of anyone in my personal circles who would enjoy it very much. Unless I one day meet a young fellow like I used to be and recognize a little bit of that lostness, that beatness in him. Then maybe I’ll mention it. From a literary standpoint, I can’t see how it got published at all. The grammar is ridiculous (much worse than what I employed above in my halfhearted attempt to imitate his style), the slang is off the chain (or whatever the kids are saying these days) — so ubiquitous that at times a modern reader can have no idea what Kerouac is talking about, and some of the sentences are hundreds of words in length. He begins to examine a thought or idea but immediately skips to some other part of the story, and randomly inserts background information willy-nilly without warning. I was thrown for a loop when he used the word “hipster”, because I thought it was a modern thing, so I had to look it up and found that it meant something (mostly) different in the 1940s

There is also no single style present. The frenetic, crazed prose I described above comprises the bulk of the book, but there are also simple explanatory sentences, as if written by someone else. And there are occasionally relatively deep and vulnerable passages:

“I didn’t know where all this was leading; I didn’t care.”
— pg. 124
“Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?”
— pg. 124
“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
— pg. 126

Note: A much shorter version of this review is available on Goodreads, here.