Dawn's Reading Blog

I have seven pages left and I’m writing the review now. The review is: if I never read the last seven pages of this book, I wouldn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

The writing has a certain flow. The author can describe a highway or a jazz club like nobody else. There was even a time when I got a little interested in Dean and started to see him as a kind of tragic hero: a hero for his effort towards a greater life, tragic for the inevitable failure of his everyday life. But that theme was never developed, as indeed no theme was ever developed. The book is one long description of a party I wasn’t at.

I wonder how a book like this gets into the top one hundred. I know it has meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Is it that its time has passed? What might once have seemed novel – young people wasting their days with drugs and philosophy, trying to solve the world’s problems by ducking their own – is a commonplace stage in every generation’s development these days. I had my own time like that and although we didn’t take road trips across the country, I think that whatever we did do was at least as interesting as this book. But then, it happened to me. As fresh, as frantic, as Kerouac manages to make his descriptions feel, they can’t compare with having been there. And having been there, I don’t particularly need to go back.

Or is it not so much the age as my age? I’m pushing forty. The self-aggrandizing musings of so-called young adults are so many wasted words to me now. I suppose it’s normal to believe that your generation has got it figured out – how to change the world by not participating: to have fun, be high, think great thoughts, wallow in your own soap opera where who loves who and said so is more important than who’s going to feed you that night. But once you’ve escaped that pit, brought on as much by drugs as youth, can you ever relish it again?

I believe a book could have been written that would have made the experience real and also put it in perspective. I don’t think this is that book.

I don’t say it was torture to read it. As I said, the book flows. But it wasn’t interesting to read it and I never picked it up willingly. I almost gave up on it entirely but it is on the 100 Best list and has the benefit of being fairly short. If I were choosing the 100 Best, I think there would be a requirement that they illustrate human nature, either by putting a well defined character in a moral dilemma or by using an unusual situation or allegory to better highlight a situation we gloss over in every day life.

Things I’d pick: Animal Farm, Les Miserables, Tale of Two Cities, 1984. I’m trying to think of situations that will stay in my mind forever, the books I’ll never forget because they taught me something about who I am. Those are the 100 Best. This ain’t.

The best thing about this book is that I learned to pronounce Kerouac. Care-o-ack. (Todd looked it up on the internet for me.) The worst thing about this book is that I have to read the last seven pages.

Rating: 3 out of 10