Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

On the Road, Jack Kerouac's epic of road travel and search for meaning in the late 1940s, was written in three weeks time, typed on a long scroll, which was really several pieces of paper taped together. Kerouac's writing has a stream of conscious, spastic nature, although it went through many years of revisions before being published. The story fictionally recounts true events in the writer's life, particularly those with Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty in the book), whom Sal, the Kerouac character, seems to have had an infatuated crush on. From New York to California and Mexico Sal drives, or rather rides, and comes across various characters and cities. The novel helped to launch the Beat movement and has influenced countless writers, artists, and readers alike, and has been deemed one of the best novels of 20th-century American literature. Significantly, it made America a literary subject. I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. I was prepared to be blown away and taken on a literary adventure of meaning and wonder, excitement and energy. I read, and waited, to no avail. I read some more, but it soon became apparent that this would not be the book for me. Despite this, I grudgingly soldiered on and completed it a few days later than I had anticipated to (I usually breeze through fiction without struggle), as I continuously put it back on my shelf only to talk myself into trying again. I'm glad I did, but found that the book's legend is far more interesting than the actually story. Split into four sections, each consecutive one involving a different road trip with more details and a shorter time-span, I found myself also becoming consecutively more involved as the book went on. The first section I found, unfortunately, tedious and little more than a listing of things he did and places he went. The following section was not as eye-rolling, and the third was tolerable. The fourth was actually interesting. There was throughout, of course, the occasional poetic and insightful passage, but they were few and far between and not really worth the effort to find. The most unfortunate flaw of the novel is that it is actually quite uninteresting. It would have made an intriguing (and bearable) novella, but its length feels frustratingly unjustified. Furthermore, and this is no fault of Kerouac, the book is hardly what popular culture has touted it to be. The text is not rebellious, but actually quite conservative. It is not forward-looking, but nostalgic. The roads that the men travel upon are by the 1950s (the book was published in 1957) of little significance as Eisenhower was quickly building up interstate freeways. Kerouac's memoirs are really a sort of nostalgia for a disappearing era. And the characters, really, are hardly rebels. Instead they drift from place to place seeking excitement, only to find the same dull existence in each setting. In the second half of the book Sal begins to grow tired of the road, and of Dean, as he sees more and more of the same. Also, Sal often feels content to be a spectator rather than a participant, watching the antics of others from a safe distance. Truly, the men are misfits. In an age when men were expected to be unemotional, solitary bread-winners, Sal is thoughtful and sensitive, indeed, tenderness between men (not sexual, as that was omitted from the original draft) is an important aspect of the novel, and he is continuously asking his aunt (mother, in life), whom he still lives with, to send him money. In this way they were unique, disenfranchised maybe, but they were not rebelling against anything. Mostly they get drunk and try to get laid in a familiar fraternity style. The characters are lonely and insecure, not hipsters or nonconformists. Their journey is about a search for stability, not spontaneity. These are not criticisms of the novel, but merely observations, and are actually the elements that make story vaguely readable. For all these reasons and more it is an important piece of Americana, and it is an interesting commentary for its time, about its time. However, great literature it is not. In fact, I can't bring myself to recommend that people spend their time going through Kerouac's thoughts, which usually amount to things being "mad," or his journal-like passages of events that tend to feel more like the notes he took about an account to be later revised into a yet-to-be-finished version. For another road story of the same period, published around the same time, take a detour and check out Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is phenomenal literature, rather than a literary phenomenon. Some may say it is a victim of its own hype, which nothing can ever live up to, but I've read some classics where that hype has been more than appropriate. Kerouac, the man and his book, is one that people tend to have very strong feelings about, either positive or negative, and perhaps he does speak to the heart of some readers. This reader, however, was unimpressed and unmoved. On the Road's importance today is more in what it symbolizes, rather than what it is.