On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

There are certain books which are a battle to get through, but which nevertheless leave you feeling as though you have achieved something. With On the Road by Jack Kerouac, it is a battle to get through each and every paragraph, and leaves you with a sense of having achieved absolutely nothing. I hated every moment of it. I have had my fair share of post-War and pre-War American authors, but for me Kerouac has proven to be the most tedious so far – and that’s including Ernest Hemingway.

The story of On the Road is a little difficult to summarize, because there isn’t one. Essentially we are narrated by a chap called Sal Paradise – a ridiculous name for an otherwise inconsequential character – a young man with a bit of wanderlust who roves around America with his layabout friends for no real reason. The main driving force behind his wanderings seems to be his friend and role-model Dean Moriarty, a habitual petty-criminal, drunkard and adulterer, whose taste for driving or hitching around the States is even greater than Sal’s. Together or apart, the two characters traipse from one coast to another and back again, drinking and whoring along the way, and with no actual purpose on their minds. At first Sal at least has a quest; to hitch his way to the west coast to get a job aboard a ship, but his plans fall through and he has to get back again. That is the rough plot synopsis of the first quarter of the book. Once he’s back home again, having briefly fallen in love with a Mexican girl before abandoning her, he gets dragged off by Dean once more on a journey to nowhere in particular, and that sums up the rest of the book.

So you could describe this book as a sort of travelogue, a story with no purpose other than to give us a backseat trip with a couple of hippie lowlifes as they tour the massive country that is America. Kerouac never ceases to give us the names of the great cities along the route, but seems rather unwilling to show us anything of them. He does not want to spend any time describing the places he travels through, or even give much of a general impression of them. Whenever Sal turns up at a new destination it’s just a case of ‘I go here, do that, drink, buy food, find somewhere to sleep, perv after girls, and move on’. There’s nothing more than that, really.

   That’s perhaps the problem with Kerouac. I know it’s a terrible cliché that a story-teller should Show and Not Tell, but Kerouac definitely seems to be a Tell sort of chap, and he’s not even telling us much. He’s so busy trying to give us an impression of what Sal did in this particular place, and then what he did next and what he did after that, that we never really get more than surface-deep into the story. There’s no poetry to it at all, just some bloke telling you what he got up to on his adventures. Rarely does he pause long enough for you to get any kind of handle on the story, to the extent that you never really get to care about where he is or what he’s doing – and as such, you rarely know what’s actually happening in the story. Not that anything ever happens in the story, this being a crucial part of the problem. It’s just one thing after another, none of which are worth paying attention to, and that’s about it.

So here we have a book with very little actual detail, and no sort of narrative. You’d expect it to be quite a short book in that case, but you’d be wrong, for On the Road is fairly long by anyone’s standards, and it’s a wonder as to why that is. There’s no detail, no story, no sprawling pages of dialogue, so what is it actually comprised of? As far as I can work out, each hefty paragraph is packed with nothing but incidental details, about what Sal does, and half-sketches of people he’s met and places he’s passed. I’d try to reproduce some of it in an excerpt here, but to give you the full picture I’d have to do a whole paragraph selected at random from somewhere in the mass of the novel – and I’m not going to subject anyone to that, least of all myself. The characters spend their time living hand-to-mouth and once or twice having a run-in with the law, meeting up with other layabouts or 'retired' layabouts, and later on having the best time in Mexico by drinking, driving sweatily through the jungle and screwing, because that proud country seems like some sort of 'Beat Generation' heaven for reasons which feel a little difficult to grasp.

Perhaps it would have been cute if we had a protagonist I actually found interesting in any way, or if Dean Moriarty was remotely likeable. Alas we have two irritating, unpleasant individuals that I would purposefully steer clear of if I had met them in real life. Dean in particular is a scumbag, a layabout who conceitedly philosophizes on quasi-mystical bullshit and on how much he loves his women all the while he screws, cheats and steals his way through life, who cares for nothing other than dragging people on his pointless excursions and showing up to wreck order and stability. He is irresponsible to the extreme, which seems to be about the only thing inside his whole character. His friends, Sal Paradise included, casually call him 'mad', but he just seems like a regular dickhead.

What other characters can be found here? None whatsoever, and certainly not anything like a female character. In fact, of the many multitude sins of this book, I would find its misogynistic mindset one of the least palatable things about it. The many female characters, of whom there are quite a few, are generally treated as little more than objects within the text, little more than playthings for the male characters. We have our eyes firmly fixed on Sal and Dean, and occasionally a lady or two can be brought along for the ride, picked up and dropped off at various times with little consequence, or else happy reactive creatures who occasionally try and spoil the fun by getting angry. This is very much a ‘masculine’ book, and I don’t mean that in a positive way.

Perhaps it would seem better if we looked at the novel in its original context; of a counterculture in 1950s America. On the Road is certainly very different from what we might expect of this time, hurriedly written-out and showcasing the rough and impoverished youth-culture underbelly of the post-War United States, replete with drink and drugs, easy sex and new musical trends, with its middle-finger held up in an almighty “Fuck-You” to those who doubt that a greater truth can be found amidst the highways and slums of this sprawling nation. If anything, this book is at least adequate in trying to get across the true scale of this continent-sprawling country, peppered with near countless cities and towns pretty much identical and uninteresting in their make up, which are in turn separated by vast distances of virtually unspoilt wilderness. Maybe that’s what the book thinks it’s trying to be, and maybe that’s what its fans and zealots believed it was back in the day, and what its modern adherents still maintain it can be in this day and age. To me, however, it looks as though it was little more than a fad, something slightly different and a little bit interesting that nevertheless has not stood the test of time, and is nowadays just a tedious brick whose ‘higher-truths’ don’t really apply anymore, if one can find them amidst the tedious, bloated prose.

So yes, On the Road is not very good, not worth reading, and is probably best avoided. It breaks moulds only by finding fresh new ways to be dull, and you can probably use your time to do something more productive.

Bibliouac

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. St. Ives: Penguin. (1972 [First published 1957])