Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of on the Road (They're Not What You Think)

Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac blasted out of the cultural mode of WWII into wide-open uncensored music and sex. Eclectic feelings poured out of the music and virginity was shrugged off. America was about to become be-bop. Was it all a reaction to the Great Depression and then World War II?

Titles like "Why Kerouac Matters," usually suggest the opposite is true. Author John Leland seems to argue as much in this fascinating dissection of the great saint's canonical, 'On the Road." The book's subtitle is, "The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)," and as such, Leland has given the classic a read like no other and assembled incontrovertible evidence to support his surprising assertions. His book attempts to grab by the horns a long-standing dilemma that, "Readers have always had a problem with Kerouac in that he had very traditional values, while living at odds with them." Essentially, Leland argues that readers have gotten Kerouac wrong. That, rather than a paean to drinking, whoring, and experience-chasing embodied in Dean Moriarity's (Neal Cassady) star turn, "On the Road" is alternately a map to maturity, a yearning for family, and a search for God manifested in its lower-keyed narrator, Sal Paradise (Kerouac). "Contrary to its rebel rep," he asserts, "'On the Road' is not about being Peter Pan; it is about becoming an adult. Its story is powerful and singularly gloomy...but good." In the end, the hippies and Easy Riders of the '60s who adopted "On the Road' as a movement's manifesto and guide to living, were not Kerouac's favorite people. Anybody who has seen the writer's drunken appearance on William Buckley's "Firing Line" can't help but be struck by the contempt he displayed toward his erstwhile disciples in a dressing down of hippie leader Ed Sanders with the words, "You like drawing attention to yourselves, don't you?" Although right-wing thinkers such as Buckley used Kerouac as foil in debunking the dreams of his own ideological offspring, Leland says they did not take him seriously and saw the same "parlor act" many others did during his boozy and rapid descent. Nonetheless, Leland's understanding of Kerouac is that of a profoundly conservative man trying to cut his way through modernity's tangle in a search for the eternal things. Kerouac he writes, "had always been conservative -- a blue-collar son, Catholic, a veteran of the merchant marine and (briefly) the Navy." For all its pot-smoking, drinking, petty-thievery and promiscuity, "On the Road," Leland observes, "[E]nds with Sal sober, at peace, ensconced in domestic life with a new flame named Laura, a great beauty who offers him cocoa and a home in her loft." Quite originally, he sees the arc of Kerouc's novel as a love story that starts with his aunt and ends up with a New York girl. For all Kerouac's sensitivity and awareness, Leland seems to suggest the author was either resistant or unaware of the seismic social shifts occurring in post-war America; an unwitting agent of change. "Kerouac had become like his father or Neal's, a relic of a working class that did not fit into the collegiate counterculture," writes Leland. The writer, we are reminded in "Why Kerouac Matters," was not born into the suburban privilege of thos

It seems to me that people either love or hate Jack Kerouac. I have always considered him to be a writer's writer: brilliant, accessible and entertaining. John Leland has done a wonderful job of seperating Kerouac from the characters in 'On the Road.' Leland is brilliant in his own right; he answers so many questions in such a satisfying way. After reading "Why Kerouac Matters," I had to re-read "On the Road." Because of Leland's book, I enjoyed Kerouac's work even more this time around. "Why Kerouac Matters" is an excellent book. I recommend it for all readers--not just those who love Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac's novel, "On the Road" is not any where near the literary standards of say, "The Great Gatsby" or "Sister Carrie", yet it is a very interesting work. This reviewer has read and reread it over the fifty years since it was published and always found it enlightening. To its credit, John Leland's book about this novel actually makes reading the novel more enjoyable. The virtue of Leland's critical essay is not so much that it breaks new ground, but that it ties the observations made by many critics and scholars over the years about the novel into coherent themes that underlie the action (or inaction) described in the novel. One of Leland's most interesting points is that Kerouac internalized the middle class values of the thirties and forties and was really out of touch with the post-WWII U.S. and especially the materialism and conformity that characterized the fifties. At the same time, he could not relate to the so-called "beat generation", that claimed him as its founder. (Allen Ginsberg, by contrast, was flexible enough to wade wholeheartedly into both the "beat" and latter Hippie movements.) In the end Kerouac was very much a man out of time and place most of his life. He tried to accept and reject the values that were part of him and his so called road novels on one level represent his search for what he really was. Some of Leland's other observations are somewhat more dubious and a few are down right loopy. Also Leland notes in passing, but does not build on the sexual ambiguity that was part of Kerouac's life and certainly at odds with his middle class value system. Indeed all the models for leading characters in "On the Road" were sexually ambivalent whose behaviors ran counter to middle class standards and norms. And yet even Neil Cassady (Dean Moriarty), as social critic Paul Goodman observed, tried to conform to middle class standards by marrying and divorcing the women he was continually seducing. Leland has provided a good think piece on what can best be described as semi-autobiographical novel whose main subjects (Kerouac/Cassady) had only a shaky hold on their real identities.

Like his previous book "Hip: The History" journalist John Leland grapples with elusive concepts. In "Hip" he tries to define that nebulous term and makes a lively engaging argument. In "Why Kerouac Matters" he tries to define the reasons that Jack Kerouac's work held and still holds a strong place in the canon of significant 20th Century literature. He points out that similarly successful work by some of Kerouac's contemporaries are now mere curiousities and not really widely read anymore. And he ventures to do some really creative literary analysis. Leland does not have the depth and rigor of a thorough academic study but he does not purport to be definitive and his arguments are lively, thought provoking, well researched and well reasoned. He seems to like to tackle somewhat nebulous ideas and I think he is very successful. As an introduction to Kerouac and for the seasoned Kerouac devotee there is a great deal to be said for this slim but succint and fascinating volume. Kudos Mr. Leland.