Well, I just finished up Jack Kerouac's On The Road for the first time. It's been popping up in conversations with various friends of mine for ages, and I figured it was about time for me to read it. This is part of my general attempt to become more acquainted with American writers.
Anyway, it was an interesting read, but it just didn't quite have that certain something that could make it great. I felt like it was very superficial, concerned with surfaces and events and appearances and experiences, which is fine, but without emotional, aesthetic, or intellectual depth to bring it into its own. The descriptions were consistently mildly evocative, but never stunning. The ideas bouncing around among the beats were silly more often than they were revelatory, and I was never able to really get pulled into the story and immersed in their experiences. That said, I'm very glad I read it, and here are a couple of reasons why.
The Good of On The Road:
First of all, Kerouac does a fantastic job of depicting America, crawling over it all and catching the feel of the various places. I feel like I know and understand my country better now, having read this, and that's got to be good for something.
Next, I love the rise and fall of Dean Moriarity's influence among the beats, and Sal Paradise's sort of cosinal movement in the same dynamic. It's very realistic, and somewhat sad, and that sort of shift is all too rarely found in literature I think. Off the top of my head I can't think of a novel that better manages a natural change of authority within a group.
The ending was phenomenal. Not that there's a climax, there isn't, things just sort of wind down. But the Mexican journey is just right, and it seems both sad and fitting for Dean to go back to Camille after he marries the New York girl. But what really got me was the last paragraph.
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarity, I even think of Old Dean Moriarity the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarity."
That thing, that monstrous final sentence, saved this book from catastrophic mediocrity and elevated it to a certain strange wonder. It really woke me to that recurring theme of looking for Dean's dad, twisted it into a search for a father figure in general and God in particular, especially in light of Sal's insistence on Dean's angelic nature. Furthermore, it seems that Kerouac rises to the height of his descriptive prowess in this and really hits on some interesting imagery.
My next book is probably going to be Ulysses... it's been too long since I read it, and I need something structured and deep to throw this sensationalist Americanism that I've been immersed in.
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