I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
We may be under orders to stay at home, but that doesn’t mean we can’t travel with our minds. Jack Kerouac didn’t exaggerate in titling his 1957 Beat classic, a work I missed when I was young but perhaps appreciate even better now that I am old. This stream-of-consciousness road trip crisscrosses America more times than one can count—east and west between New York and California, north and south between Denver and Mexico, pointlessly, years on end, at dash-gripping speeds punctuated by hedonistic slow nights, all sex and drugs and jazz and crazy cats, like Hoo! Whee! as the fictional maniac Dean Moriarty would say.
Like Kerouac’s alcohol-fueled adventures, his caffeine-fueled manuscript, typed over three weeks in the spring of 1951 on one continuous roll of paper, draws on five years of memories with the likes of such Beat luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. The language of this pointless saga is electric with imagery and emotions so rich that a paragraph feels likes an hour in real time, but an hour impossibly recalled the morning-after with crystalline clarity and tenderness, where the narrator gaped into the bleakness of his own days, where contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air, and love is a duel. Small wonder the Modern Library ranks it 55th among the 20th Century’s top 100 English language books.
I haven’t seen Walter Salles’ 2012 film and doubt that I will. Someone else’s interpretation can of this wild ride only spoil the nuggets that speak to my own sheltered existed. But I loved Will Patton’s narration on Audible. Even turning 320 pages, I suspect this story would fly by like the golden prairie outside a Greyhound window.