Open this book anywhere

On the Road is the easiest novel to find "favourite lines" in. Just open to any page. It's at such a consistent intensity that important, quotable sentences typical of the book's overall tone are found wherever you turn.

You can also read the book this way, opening it at random and immersing yourself in whatever crazy adventures are at that point engulfing Sal Paradise (a stand-in for the author) and his bohemian buddies, especially that charismatic conman and man-child Dean Moriarty (Kerouac's real-life friend Neal Cassady) but also including Carlo Marx (based on Allen Ginsberg) and Old Bull Lee (William S, Burroughs).

Not that their escapades are particularly exciting in any sense of suspenseful action. They usually involve getting stoned, talking themselves into a frenzy, raving over music, falling in lust, or simply getting high on life. In the big American cities. In rural backwaters. In Mexican whorehouses. En route between these places.

What makes it thrilling is the writing. It's like nothing you've read before. At least nothing written before 1957, before others got around to imitating Kerouac's apparently free-flowing style.

Much has been made of this inspired spontaneous-sounding prose. It's in-the-moment writing. It's jazz writing. It's automatic writing produced at top speed. A tour de force of unfettered genius. On the Road was created in three weeks of frenetic typing without pause for revisions, without punctuation, every word dropping right into its irremovable place....

That's the myth anyway.

Reasons I don't believe it are, first, On the Road is conventionally punctuated, even if many lines do run on very long in the most excitable parts. So it was certainly edited into sensible paragraphs and sentences at some point.

Second, On the Road is thought to have been written in 1951 and to have gone through several revisions as Kerouac looked for a publisher. When he finally found one in 1955, he had to cut it by a third. Apparently seven typescript versions of On the Road are known. I'd be very surprised if the final version looked very much like the first. Any good writer will re-write and reshape as he cuts. If the final version looks seamlessly spontaneous, I'm sure it took hours of sweat to achieve that effect. 

Third, On the Road is just too well written to have emerged intact from Kerouac's drug and booze-fevered forehead. I've seen the kind of prose that wonderful writers produce while they're loosening up, when they're hammering out text without concern for structure or consistency. It's not pretty—not yet, not in that form. And it's certainly not sustained over pages. On the Road maintains its level over hundreds of pages. It's not all brilliant of course. Much of it is mundane—we drove here, we drove there, we slept, we woke up in a ditch. But it all makes sense. It's all of a piece. And enough of it is brilliant to make it inconceivable that it could have been produced without a lot of thought.

True, On the Road is famous for being unstructured. Kerouac purposely avoided literary conventions, attempting to create a new, more liberated kind of fiction. Yet, running through the novel are a few stories that do develop and reach climaxes of sorts. One of course is the rise and decline of Dean Moriarty. Another is the narrator Sal's search for love, acceptance and domestic bliss, conflicting with his attraction to the mania represented by Dean and the excitement of life on the road.

Another theme is the quest for enlightenment. This one is somewhat surprising. For quite a while you think it's kicks the boys are seeking. And for quite a while it may be. But gradually you realize their hunger runs deeper. Their love of jazz, their appreciation of outcasts they meet along the way, their romantic and sexual adventures, their stoned binges—they're too intense, too ecstatic. "Yes! yes!" Dean is always saying. Dean and Sal are continually enthusing over finding "It", which would be the perfect elusive, ephemeral moment, without past or future, when the seeker exists in the pure present.  Finally it it strikes them in an odd kind of mystical experience in Mexico. A glimpse of nirvana perhaps, or just a distorted awareness from drugs, sex and lack of sleep? The moment is both a coming together and a sign of falling apart.

This is hard to explain without quoting a couple of pages in full. Nothing particular happens. No explicit insights are revealed. But the prose in the voice of Sal Paradise (an obviously appropriate name) carries the message in the way it's written. It's a triumph of style over logic, for it can be only be hinted at by form, never delineated by content.

And then the melancholy ending. The last chapter is again a masterpiece of evocation.

Not an approach or a view that I favour, being of more critical mind. But I can appreciate the accomplishment and am moved by it.

Not everyone is. Many people read a hundred pages into On the Road and give it up. "It's the same thing over and over. Nothing ever happens. There's no character development. It's like listening to a drunk ramble on and on...."

I understand. And if that's your reaction, you may as well drop it. Just as many people will never get bebop jazz or Indian raga music. I'm one of them. I'm aware that if I were to make a stronger sustained effort to understand them, I would probably learn to see the development, the kind of "what happens", that takes place in them. And be better off for it. Might even come to love it. But I only have so much time and I'd rather spend it on other more familiar music that I can get something out of right now.

Even if you don't get Kerouac's writing directly, in all likelihood you will eventually get it indirectly—through the works of later writers who took many of his innovations and used them in more conventional settings. Already, On the Road does not seem as bizarre as it did when it first became a cult hit in the 1950s.

Its mainstream reputation has been in and out of critical favour over the years, but I think On the Road may go down in literary history as one of two or three novels, including The Catcher in the Rye, that dramatically changed American writing for better or worse in the mid-twentieth century.       

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