The 'Road' much traveled
JACK KEROUAC'S "On the Road" has been iconic since it appeared Sept. 5, 1957. A roman à clef about the author's cross-country adventures (as Sal Paradise) with friend Neal Cassady, known in the book as Dean Moriarty, the novel was begun in the late 1940s and completed, famously, in April 1951, in a three-week writing marathon on a 120-foot scroll.
Several new books commemorate the novel's 50th anniversary, including "Road Novels 1957-1960," edited by Douglas Brinkley (Library of America: 864 pp., $35); "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think)" by John Leland (Viking: 206 pp., $23.95); and the first publication of Kerouac's unedited "scroll manuscript," "On the Road: The Original Scroll" (Viking: 408 pp., $25.95). Book Review asked a variety of writers (including Cassady's widow, Carolyn, and novelist Joyce Johnson, who once dated Kerouac) for their thoughts on why the novel still resonates.
When I was a teenager, I got about halfway through "On the Road," but the section where Kerouac takes up with Terry, a Latina living in a migrant-labor camp, is where I stopped. I knew this wasn't my story; I identified with Terry instead of the narrator or his drifter-dude friends.
Years passed. Or decades. A friend memorized the last long meandering sentence of "On the Road" and recited it marvelously for me one day. So I forgave Kerouac, picked the book up again and got all the way to that flashing finale. Kerouac cursed us with both a new version of the Huck Finn fantasy that a man's destiny is to keep on moving (or fleeing) and the novice writer delusion that the spontaneous effusions of a pure soul are lyric manna, rather than raw material at best. He worked hard to create his language, and it is beautiful at times, daring to yearn for something incandescent, overwhelming, transcendent, miraculous and sweet. Even if he's a creep about Terry.
-- Rebecca Solnit
"Who can comprehend it, the vast tableland of America?" asked Norman Mailer in "The Naked and the Dead," and Kerouac, perhaps not comprehending but moving through, crisscrossed the country just as the first concrete was being poured for the interstates. I read "On the Road" in Philadelphia at 16, still in my parent's house, all night until bleary at 3 a.m., I finished, exhilarated, ready to get on the road myself.
