JACK KEROUAC — ON THE ROAD

The author with William S. Burroughs (left)

There must have been some logic behind my decision not to read this book earlier in my life, but I’m finding it difficult to reconstruct. Did I pick it up and decide, ‘Nah’? I remember reading Dr. Sax by Kerouac at 17 or 18, finding it likeble/forgettable. I probably selected Sax out of my adolescent habit of chasing ephemera before The Hits. Same reason I spent so many hours poring over Nuggets before sitting down with some Beatles records.

I’m feeling lucky I waited to read On the Road. I’ve done some cross-country road trips at this point. So I can connect my own experiences and I have some perspective. I can accept as a true part of Kerouac’s young authorial self when he veers off into jazz reveries (in these sequences he shoots up his prose with synthetic melanin) and general horndoggery. At a younger age, I think I would have found the jazz and sex some pretty lame posturing, but now I find it… sometimes endearing, sometimes not, but generally true to the character of a young man on the road. The part in Mexico is the only time I found his account kinda embarrassing — just how generic the experience plays. Smoking weed! Sex workers in a brothel! OOoooOOOOooo! Must have been difficult to end On the Road. You either stay on the road or you don’t. If you don’t, the ending is boring. If you do, the thing goes on forever. 

Read August 2022.