On the Road, Jack Kerouac (Viking Press, 1957) ****

 

I first tried to read this book nearly 50 years ago and couldn’t get past the first few chapters.  The narrator seemed to be an impressionable fool whose friends were mostly psychopaths.  Besides which,  hitchhiking or tooling around the country in beat-up cars with friends and drinking lots of beer and in general behaving like an irresponsible adolescent didn’t seem all that unique (I’d done much the same my last few years of high school and the first year after graduating, before a three year stint in the Marines rather significantly changed my world-view).  Still, I knew this was a classic so I  recently picked up a used copy of the book and this time had quite a different experience.

 

It’s a fictionalized autobiography/travelogue but I wouldn’t compare it with Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, both excellent personal travelogues with lots of  glimpses into an America that is fast fading (especially in places like southern California).  Kerouac’s book is more a chronicle of adventures experienced by a small group of ‘beat generation’  types as they drive back and forth across the country, focusing mostly on New York City, Denver, and several parts of California, with significant visits to New Orleans and a long drive through Mexico, which is where the journey ends.   This small group of friends-writers, ranchers, students, bums and ex-cons are traveling from place to place (or from girl friend to wife to girlfriend) and back again, searching for that perfect feeling of what is ‘right’, living often from hand-to-mouth and sometimes by wile and theft.  It’s a darker picture of those two decades preceding the sixties, a time which for many of us was happier and more productive as we finished college, married, started families and careers. 

 

This chronicle of adventures and misadventures is sprinkled with numerous side trips through small towns along the way, especially if they are hitch-hiking instead of driving.  If you’ve done much hitch-hiking and remember your late teens as a time when a road trip was sometimes the best of adventures, you’ll relate to this book—and that probably makes this somewhat of a ‘guy’ book (I don’t remember that any of my women friends ever hitchhiked, even back in the late forties and early fifties when it was safer to do so).  However, Kerouac’s near-poetic and memorable descriptions of some of the neighborhoods and their resident characters provide most of the appeal of this book, and on that basis alone I’d recommend the book to any of you who find different people and places interesting and worth exploring, even through someone else’s eyes.  In spite of today’s high gasoline prices, this book does evoke an urge to hop in your car to drive somewhere else--just for the sake of traveling.