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This is the book which has glared at me from its high pedestal of classical importance in an effort to browbeat me into finally finishing it. The story is set in the late 1940s, told in the first person by Sal Paradise, a budding writer given to ecstasies about America, hot jazz, the meaning of life, and marijuana. The book’s protagonist is Dean Moriarty (“a sideburned hero of the snowy West”), who has spent a third of his waking time in poolrooms, a third in jail, a third in public libraries, and is always shouting “Yes, yes, yes!” to every experience. Dean and Sal and their other buddies—Carlo Marx, the frenzied poet; Ed Dunkel, an amiable cipher; Remi Boncoeur, who has the second loudest laugh in San Francisco—are forever racing cross-country to meet one another. Their frantic reunions are curiously reminiscent of lodge and business conventions, with the same shouts of fellowship, hard drinking, furtive attempts at sexual dalliance—and, after a few days, the same boredom. Main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are clearly enthusiastic fans of the jazz/bebop and early rhythm-and-blues musicians and records that were in the musical mix during the years when story took place, 1947 to 1950. Sal, Dean, and their friends are repeatedly depicted listening to specific records and going to clubs to hear their musical favorites.
Giroux subsequently rejected On the Road in 1951, and all other Kerouac novels submitted to him over the years. The 1951 rejection of On the Road effectively ended Kerouac's personal and professional relationship with Giroux, whom he had considered a friend, and his professional relationship with Harcourt Brace. It would be another six years before he was again published professionally, when Viking published On the Road at the urging of Malcolm Cowley. Please forgive my review. It is early morning and I have just woken up with a sore head, an empty bed and a full bladder.
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And it being a travelogue based on real experience there is of course no plot and as it turns out no real sense of progression, which led to the book feeling rather samey after a while. It was apparently hand written on a roll of wallpaper and it really does feel rather like a long list of "and then and then and then".
The trouble is a matter of repetition. Everything Mr. Kerouac has to tell about Dean has been told in the first third of the book, and what comes later is a series of variations on the same theme. It's a good theme—the inability of a young man of enormous energy, considerable intelligence, and a kind of muddled talent for absorbing experience to find any congenial place for himself in organized society—but the variations are all so much alike that they begin to cancel each other out. a b Kemp, Stuart (6 May 2010). "Kristen Stewart goes On the Road". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on 2010-05-13 . Retrieved 2010-05-07.Johnston, Allan (Spring 2005). "Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation". College Literature. 32 (2): 103–126. doi: 10.1353/lit.2005.0028. JSTOR 25115269. S2CID 144789716. It hardly mattered. On publication, Kerouac awoke to find himself famous. Just before midnight on 4 September 1957, Kerouac left his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side to wait at the 66th street news-stand for the next day’s edition of the New York Times. He had been tipped off that his novel was going to be reviewed by Gilbert Millstein, but he cannot have anticipated the critic’s excitement. Millstein declared that On the Road’s publication was “a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion”. The novel, Millstein continued, was “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘Beat’, and whose principal avatar he is.” I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was "Wow!" (P. 37) One time I ate only pie for an entire week. I was driving across the country with my buddies, and we decided to eat only pie.”
Alternatively, this book can be named White Heterosexual Man's Misadventures and Chauvinistic Musings. And even that makes it sound much more interesting and less offensive than it actually is.The narrative takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis." Perhaps the predominant mood and attitude of the book and Kerouac's view of the period is summarized on Sal's 3rd trip to San Francisco: The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread-eagled fingers, chords, or at intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast--Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink, and wire, boing!" (P. 197)
John Leland (2007). Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think). New York: Viking. p. 17. However, I think the point he was making (if not, then the point I am making) is that most of life is ephemeral. It just happens and it's gone forever. Truman Capote agreed to appear on David Susskind’s “Open End” show, with Norman Mailer — who kept praising the Beat-Generation writers. Capote thought their product worthless. “It’s nothing,” he said. “That’s not writing; that’s just typewriting.” The following year, in 1940, Kerouac began his freshman year as a football player and aspiring writer at Columbia University. However, he broke his leg in one of his first games and was relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the season. Although his leg had healed, Kerouac's coach refused to let him play the next year, and Kerouac impulsively quit the team and dropped out of college. He spent the next year working odd jobs and trying to figure out what to make of his life. He spent a few months pumping gas in Hartford, Connecticut. Then he hopped a bus to Washington, D.C., and worked on a construction crew building the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Eventually, Kerouac decided to join the military to fight for his country in World War II. He enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1943, but was honorably discharged after only 10 days of service for what his medical report described as "strong schizoid trends." This novel bears out a recent remark by Truman Capote on the Beat Generation writers, “It is not writing. It simply is not writing. It is, it is only typing.” What more can one say?I would only add that this clean text, rendered in a standard format, was published about five years later; the political and economic context of the USA was different. And the crazy American youth who discovered it then found there may be different aspirations—those of Kerouac when he was writing this novel. In December 1948, Scribner's again rejected the manuscript, despite changes that Kerouac had made to the text. Little Brown also rejected the book that same month, declining publication due to its excessive length, which meant the book would be prohibitively expensive for a first novel. (Most of the costs of publishing a first novel are the costs of paper and binding, and a long book makes it harder for the publisher to recoup its costs.) Cowley, Malcolm; Young, Thomas Daniel (1986). Conversations with Malcolm Cowley. University Press of Mississippi. p. 111. VITALE: The late poet Allen Ginsberg says that his writing style was simply an extension of Kerouac's. In 1985 at his Lower East Side apartment, Ginsberg told me when he met Kerouac in the 1940s, Kerouac was already experimenting, like a jazz musician, with spontaneous improvisation. The descriptions of bebop jazz are absolutely astounding throughout as they listen to Prez, Bird, Dizzy...
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