2013 read #16: On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
307 pages
Published 1957
Read from January 29 to January 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

To understand my impressions of Jack Kerouac, you have to start with my brother.

Randy, so far as I can remember, never explicitly mentioned Kerouac, or anything Beat-related, but from the very beginning he romanticized chump-change criminality. At 11 he entertained bizarre notions of running a grade-school "co-op," a proto-mafia where tots could pool their money and somehow accomplish great things under the noses of the adult community, as if reality were some kind of direct-to-video sequel to The Sandlot. He shoplifted GI Joes at age 12, giving me (and possibly believing) the excuse that we two were "owed" more toys than our father would buy us. He would steal our grandmother's tip money and buy us boxes of Little Debbies whenever the grownups were gone. By 13 he was shoplifting cassette tapes, Nirvana and Ugly Kid Joe and Pearl Jam; he had me transcribe the lyrics with him, because he was certain that the act of writing them down ourselves somehow made them original productions, which we would record and thereby become international superstars. Also by 13, he argued and bullied me (however much I cried, because I was only 9) into acceding to his plans to kill our father.

Brotherhood is a strange symbiosis -- we fought viciously, and he pulled a knife on me more than once; I baited him constantly; yet we never, ever ratted on each other to our father, and in some corner of my brain I worshiped him. I imitated his shoplifting predilections with much less success. (Much later, I shoplifted just to have food in my stomach, but that's another story, way beyond the scope of this review.) I began writing because of him, too, putting our GI Joe characters into stock sci-fi scenarios (aliens, time travel, a violent potty-humor sequel to Jurassic Park). But there were places I wouldn't follow him. From age 14 on he got wrapped up in narco-romantic fantasies, fueled by daily clandestine trips up the street to our maternal family, who kept him supplied with cigarettes and alcohol. No matter how much he enticed me, no matter how much he bullied me, I never went up the street with him, never met our sisters, never met our mother, never met our uncles. And I never got into his affectations of dissipated Bohemianism.

Randy ran away once and for all when he was 16 and I was 12. I got stuck in delayed adolescence, a fugue of years blurring one into the next, living on the road with my father, sleeping in rest stops and national forests, escaping my father's paranoid delusions by writing the same derivative science fiction stories. I didn't see Randy again until I was 16. My grandmother and I were waiting in a shopfront doorway for a bus, huddled from the cold, when this short skinny blond dude stalked by, sucking a cigarette. I was taller than him now and his hairline was prematurely receding; we barely recognized each other. But we struck up a brief reacquaintance. During the month or so that we stayed in touch, I typed up a chapter from one of my novels for him to read, craving his approval just like old times. I forget exactly what he said; it was something like "I thought you'd have developed more than this." And then Randy blew up at our father and that was that.

We made a third and final attempt to be brothers shortly after I got out of the army. A few years of harder drugs, absentee fatherhood, periodic homelessness, and flailing attempts at alternative rock stardom contributed to my brother's... special... writing style. Even in his personal emails he affected this painfully artsy try-hard prose, full of hard drink and hard living, quoting dead philosophers and dangling out off-rhythm digressions. In style he was closer to the hobo-chic ramblings of Godspeed You! Black Emperor liner notes, though in content he made himself out to be some latter-day rust-belt Ginsberg. Our reemergent relationship, never sturdy, eroded after I refused to let him come to New York and crash indefinitely on our couch. His subsequent schizotypal diagnosis confirmed my prejudices.

So when I think of Beat writers, that's the image in my head: The oh-so-artistic try-hard indulging in dissipation and narco-romantic cynicism, exactly conforming in his rush to be nonconformist -- the very art and philosophy of protracted adolescence. But perhaps that isn't entirely fair. For one thing, I based that impression on latter-day basement hipsters like my brother. I have never read anything by Kerouac or Ginsberg or Burroughs. I've never been drawn to that sort of thing, if you couldn't tell by my snide talk of "narco-romanticism." Getting wasted and wasting away isn't my game, pops. Yet I've always felt I should probably give the Beat dudes a chance, if only so I know what I'm talking about when I scoff at their modern followers.

(Incidentally, do kids still read Kerouac? At this point, I feel Beat aesthetics and sensibilities are so thoroughly integrated into the substance of teenage intellectualism that there's a good chance today's kids don't feel the need to imbibe from their philosophical prototypes directly. Kids with a taste for philosophy and self-importance are just expected to indulge in drugs and petty anti-establishment manifestos while angsting over "meaning." Or at least that's my expectation. I haven't interacted with many young would-be intellectuals since I was that age myself. I'm a child of the late 20th century, raised in a time of inward-looking optimism; I have no idea what kids of the early 21st century think or expect.)

On the Road was well-written and occasionally appealing -- the parts actually set on the road in the pre-interstate West were big favorites. The inevitable and oft-repeated excursions through hard drinking and burned out hedonism and philosophy, though, were boring. Reading about someone's bender is, to me, exactly as entertaining (and illuminating) as an account of someone's night on the sofa watching NBC. I just can't seem to give a damn.

Lines like "[I wished] I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America" do Kerouac no favors in my eyes, unless there's a "Holden Caulfield is the biggest phony of all" angle I didn't pick up on. What intrigued me the most was the scarcely mentioned subtext of World War II, the psychological stain of it between the words, resignation under the terrible light of the Bomb. I know exactly nothing about Kerouac's views on how his generation got so damn beat in the first place, or his own wartime experiences (the about the author page said he was a merchant marine), but it's certainly something my late 20th century mind picked up on. It added a more sympathetic dimension to all the drugged-out soul-searching and sentimentalism.

If you're done with young men getting strung out and indulging adolescent melancholia, On the Road is about half of a good book. I can safely assume that I have never gotten, and will never get, the appeal of the other half, even if it would've been obvious to someone like my brother from day one.