From The Pen Of Frank Jackman- Ti Jean’s Big Road Novels Book- The Library Of America Kerouac

 

Book Review

Jack Kerouac: The Road Novels: 1957-1960, Jack Kerouac, Library Of America, 2007

…yah, 2007, fifty years after the mad max scrolled out publication of Ti Jean’s great autobiographical American West adventure, On The Road , complete with golden all-american west cowboy (okay, maybe not cowboy in occupational sense, but in the yearning for wide open spaces, for the self-reliance, for the non-conformity, for the lessons learned in jail, for the wild boy Saturday night let god count up the survivors Sunday morning, and, yes, for the con man, big hat braggadocio, and lonesome constant bewildered chatter to keep his inner demons away) bonded soul mate, for a while anyway, until the next best thing came along as it turned out, we get a bonanza, a plethora, an immense big old volume of his road novels. And so once again we get to read all in one spot the zigzag cross continental comings and goings of Sal and Dean (and a cast of characters this age, this new age, has been unable to match). The struggle to break out of that encroaching red scare cold war night and its conformities, the jail break-out of those who suffered through the 1930s and the war and yearned to have a little space for themselves in this wicked old world. Some of the stuff, in retrospect, may have been merely silly, some of it frankly weird, and some of it only possible as we of the next generation learned only under a heavy drug veil but with at least two, if not more, major all-american literary talents that helped define the times through the be-bop beat movement that silliness, that weirdness, that heavy drug veil was a small price to pay for endless nights of reading and re-reading the book, the poems and the journals.

Add to that the Dharma Bums spiritual quest, fairly unsuccessful for Jack in the end as he vanished to his mother’s porch, vanished from the road anyway where he made his literary dough, but providing a good section on that famous Howl night when the adventurous bad boys of American literature threw down the gauntlet (rather than like Mailer, Jones, and Styron chase that great American novel idea to impress the New York, no, the Manhattan literary crowd) and said take that moloch America. Then a small novella, The Subterraneans, about tough love, tough interracial love, although really about being able to love and write that second million word. No go. Sorry Jack. And finish up with the beatest work, Tristessa, about the fellahin world, Mexican section, and the struggle to face the day under the spell of Mister Jones, this side of Nelson Algren’s Man With A Golden Arm, some “travelogue’ essays (including one of the best tributes to the long gone daddy hoboes from a non-hobo around) and journal entries to thrill the academics. Yes, a book cheap at any price. And get this-fifty years later the works still makes one, or should make one, want to reach for the car keys and go, leaving maybe just an e-mail address behind.