Acquired: Borrowed from a friend and never returned.
The book: a Penguin paperback, published in 1972 and still in extremely good condition. My friend bought it second hand and from the pristine condition of the pages I can’t help wondering if I’m not the only person who had this on their ‘any day now’ list...
I remember the evening I first picked up this book. I was staying at a friend's house after a party and, having a vague awareness of what the book was about, grabbed it for a quick look before bedtime. I didn't get past the first page though and took it home the next day intending to read and return. Never did that either. Whoops.
Approximately 17 years and around six house moves later it was still sitting on my bookshelves, in pristine condition and gathering dust until this blog forced me to take a look. It’s hard to know what the reluctance was. Maybe there was a smell of 'homework' off it, a sense that it was one of those books you have to read... they are not necessarily the ones you enjoy. Anyway, I've now finally opened and finished it and am very glad I got around to doing so.
Most people have the same vague awareness of the premise as I did, Sal Paradise and a group of friends wander across the US in the 1950s, mostly drinking and taking drugs, occasionally working at what are now known as McJobs, spending most of their time looking for fun and jazz and drugs and girls. But I have to say my initial reaction on reading was intense relief that I hadn’t tried to struggle through it all those years ago. I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was talking about. Not in terms of the parties – although I’d like to point out that Bennies didn't feature at our humble gatherings – but in terms of the US and the Road itself. I first borrowed the book in the early 90s when the concept of hopping on a plane to do some Christmas shopping in New York was about as likely as chartering the plane and flying it yourself. And even though I'd seen a lot of New York and LA on television, the concept of the US having wide open spaces to be explored would have meant nothing to me.
But now I’m in the lucky position of having spent several holidays travelling around the US, including visits to many of the locations Kerouac is talking about and the opening quarter of the book took me right back there. This first section is breathless and addictive as Sal makes his way mostly by thumb out of New York and westwards across the country.
The joy of hitchhiking lies in the people you meet along the way and Kerouac creates a few unforgettable characters, most notably the big corn fed Minnesotan brothers who speed across the land picking up random strangers who are flung into their open truck and driven at speed across the countryside. The newly formed gang share drink, cigarettes and stories as they hurtle through the darkness, it's beautifully written and far more conventional in terms of pace and language than I was expecting.
"We zoomed through another crossroads town, passed another line of tall lanky men in jeans clustered in the dim light like moths on the desert and returned to the tremendous darkness, and the stars overhead were pure and bright because of the increasingly thin air as we mounted the high hill of the western plateau..."
Irish people often assume that going to the States involves big cities and sky scrapers, but the opening chapters of ‘On the Road’ celebrate the discovery of the rural, and the small, as Sal, a New Yorker goes 'down the country', ending up in a small town where
"big crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and ten gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire bustled and whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne;'.
He decides to stay and his new found friends continue without him.
"And the truck left, threading its way through the crowds, and nobody paying attention to the strangeness of the kids inside the tarpaulin staring at the town like babes from a coverlet."
So far so good, his words placed me right beside him on the sidewalk of Cheyenne and by the time I got this far into the novel I was beginning to regret the amount of time I had spent not reading it. But although the actual ‘On the Road’ bits are fascinating, it's when Paradiso stops moving that the novel becomes more difficult, and less interesting. Looking for youth and life and jazz and freedom is all very well but it can get a little dull after a while, particularly with a cast of mostly un-engaging characters. Most of them are male as well of course, the women who do appear in the book tend to be sidekicks, girlfriends, hangers on or amenable aunts with flexible purses. As the book gathers pace and Sal alternates travel with a vague kind of settling down the writing gets a bit wilder, a little more druggy and scattered. That would be fine apart from the fact that the story gets pretty fuzzy too. It's like bar talk, that deep and meaningful conversation you can't tear yourself away from at 3am which would sound neither lucid nor interesting if replayed at 3pm the following day. And to be honest I didn't connect with the characters enough to follow them through this part of their journey and I found myself rushing through the closing chapters, fast losing interest.
But I was reading it in a very different time and place to when it was written. I can absolutely imagine how thrilling it must have been for a teenager in the 1960s to pick it up and be told, just go, do it, live it, see it. I have no doubt that it changed some lives, or at the very least stirred up several imaginations. There's a movie due out next year too which will no doubt inspire another generation of teenagers to carry it around in their back pockets. I've no idea whether or not they will actually read it, but I'm glad I did.
Recommended.
Next up it's Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd.
Sinéad Crowley
