The Portable Jack Kerouac

Good resource for quick picks of maestro Kerouac!

Do you love Kerouac? Look no further, this is the volume that you need. One stop shop.

This is a great introduction to the range of styles and themes that Kerouac's artistry brings to the page. Ann Charters, who wrote one of the first and best of the long line of Kerouac biographies, shows herself to be a deft editor in this volume. She fits the "essential" chapters of Kerouac's major books together to present a mosaic of his talent and invites us to follow Kerouac from his "Town and City" Thomas Wolfe style through the wild marijuana sense-o-round syntax of "Dr. Sax" and "Mexico City Blues" to the benzedrine jack-hammers in "The Subterraneans," "On the Road" and "Visions of Cody". Along the way we see Kerouac's energy brown and shrivel in "The Dharma Bums"; his sentimentality run amuck in "Tristessa" and "Visions of Gerald." We read cobbled-together explanations of what "Beat" means, and the "first thought/best thought" of spontaneous prose that's become a siren song for so much post-post-post modern blather. "Who touches this book touches the man," Whitman said (or should have said, if he didn't), and the same surely applies to Kerouac, whose writing falters as his body falters and youth, health, mind and being fume away in a great "Bonfire of the Vanities." Charters gives the essentials to us--even down to the English language haiku complete with dead flies in medicine cabinets. Pick this book up first, along with the Charters' biography, then move on to Charters' Portable Beat Anthology, then branch out (if you need to) to the new volumes of Kerouac being "discovered" all the time and keep the dream, the romance of the "open road" going--along with the steady industry that Beat-dom has grown to become in the 21st century. In this chunky volume, Ann Charters presents the very best of Kerouac and does not pretend to redefine his worst writing as somehow his best, as do those with a vested interest in Kerouac the Buddhist Saint. For that, all clear-headed readers must thank her.

Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac. "As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg", recently I have been in a "beat" generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac's lesser work under review here, "Big Sur", that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell's `bad boy', the "king of the 1950s beat writers". And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, "On The Road", his classic modern physical and literary `search' for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title "The Legend Of Duluoz". Excerpts, in some cases like from "On The Road" large excerpts, from those dozen or so works form the core of this compilation," The Portable Jack Kerouac". That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac's death, are under the sign of this six hundred page `teaser'. And 'teaser' is exactly the right word, for anthologies in general, but Kerouac's work in particular. I have tried in previous reviews to start to distinguish between what you NEED to read of Kerouac's and what is merely repetitious. The editor, who is very familiar with Kerouac's work both a devotee and something of an early and definite biography, has taken pains to give excerpts from all the main volumes mentioned above like "Dharma Bums", "Maggie Cassady" , "Vanities Of Duluoz" and the like. The problem for me is that they just whetted my appetite. However for the novice this should be the place to start AFTER you have read the master work "On The Road". As for self-styled aficionados like myself what is probably more interesting is various miscellany, poems, interviews and the like that give a better sense of this tormented working class fellaheen's writing thoughts. Nicely done for an anthology.

GRANTED that the selections are a mishmash of Kerouac styles, and at times misuse words with a kind of tender haughtiness and screw you if you don't like it but this is what I bruit. Bruit? But at his best Kerouac time and again tells us of that railroad earth and trains rolling under October skies and rushes up our noses with piney phrases that would raise gooseflesh on Thomas Wolfe. What's more, Ann Charters serves Jack nobly by inventively selecting along a timeline that captures the hero's age throughout, a superb bit of editing much like Malcolm Cowley's for The Portable Faulkner in which he patched together a groundbreaking picture of Yoknapatawpha County from Faulkner's many works. A Must-Have Kerouac volume that should break ground for new readers and give old admirers a bath in that old spontaneous prose he dreamed up nightly with candlelight on the kitchen table, booze, and weed. Some of it's mush, some visionary, and much of it just what writing should be: straight from the heart.

For a true kerouac reader, i think it's worth it to work through this book. It's long, but a good part of it is the editor talking, a woman who has a true love of Kerouac. It's a little bit of everything, from his letters, to his ideas on buddhism(my personal fave) It's a good, but long, read