On the Road by Jack Kerouac is often cites as one of the best English language novels ever, but my experience with it suggests that to get that level of appreciation out of it you really need to have lived through the beatnick era to which it’s supposed to be a touchstone. I found it horribly grueling.
The book ostensibly tells the story of insouciant traveller Sal Paradise (essentially a stand-in for Kerouac), who criss-crosses North America in the late 1940s. Along the way he meets and travels with a lot of different characters, most notably the hyperactive and womanizing Dean Moriarty. Sal and his companions are just half a step up from being vagabonds as they rely on a combination of cars, hitchiking, odd jobs, and panhandling to make their way west from New York. Zany things happen and it’s all very slice of life for a very unorthodox life.
The novel is largely plotless, and I guess it’s best appreciated as a series of interconnected vignettes about American life during the period. We get to see a lot of different people of the type that at the time of publication probably weren’t discussed much in American literature or culture at large. It’s all very flavorful and in a way reminded me of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat –just a bunch of guys who loaf around, drink, and convince themselves that loafing and drinking are the most noble of pursuits.
This is fine and all, but it just didn’t work for me. Ironically I grew restless and bored with all the shenanigans and all the traveling around and the endless parade of characters that don’t seem to matter at all in any kind of narrative or personal sense. It’s colorful, but sprawling and formless. I guess that’s largely the point of the book, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to love it.
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