Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century
by
Annette Ferran
On the Road
Read
enough novels and you start to develop the notion that there is such a thing as
“the novel,” that there is a norm, differences in style, voice, attitude, and
structure notwithstanding. And
then pops up a novel that subverts this notion. One on the Modern Library’s
list is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
(#55).
This novel occupies a place on another
list of mine: the 10 books that have most influenced my life. (Naming your top
10 books is a challenge active in the social media realm right now. Try it; it’s
interesting and amusing. Also, by exchanging lists with friends, you’ll surely
get some more titles for your must-read list.)
Kerouac
is, like Hemingway, an exhaustively discussed and analyzed American author,
with himself as an artist as much the topic as his work—and with good reason,
as Kerouac is the type of writer whose own self is inseparable from his
creative output. On the Road is a
piece of writing that comes straight from the gut. I believe if you read this
book for the first time at the wrong age, it will land like a lump or pass
right by you. But if you read it at the right time, it will lift you high.
The
premise of the plot is a trip by car across the United States. The car is
supposed to be delivered from the West coast to the East coast; the young men
driving it are hired to complete this job. What happens in the course if this
trip is an exultant meditation on just about everything in life, in the
language of jazz. Jazz music at
that time was crazy and heretical. It had entered an era of experimentation
that exploded it out of its shell of “America’s classical music.” It was, depending on the listener’s
stance, impossible to listen to, hardly resembling music at all, or a portal to
the greatest aesthetic and spiritual experience ever. The magic of On the Road is how the writing captures
the essence of this music. The language and rhythms of this writing are the
typewritten equivalent of bebop jazz. Read one, listen to the other, and you
have in your possession the spirit of that time in American life.
These
people in this novel are outsiders, of course. They are not the norm. But they
portended the great upheavals that the country was about to face. They were the
avant-garde of the generation gap that itself became a norm. And this is why
the novel is so influential.
Through the courage, the rebellion, the rogue nature of Kerouac comes a
work of semi-fiction that lets a young reader of a certain inclination know that
other things are possible. Other lifestyles, other ways of viewing the world,
other—more esoterically—aesthetic experiences exist for the curious, the
restless, the disenfranchised, the creatively driven citizens of the
world. There are paths to
fulfillment through art that haven’t yet been forged.
Kerouac’s
own life is not one, perhaps, to be emulated. He himself did not quite break
free of the conventions to which he was born. He stayed with his mother, he
stayed with his wife, he stayed tied to the small town and to the ethnicity of
his origin. He carried in his
psyche all the conflicts of all of the above and then some, and they ended up
killing him young. But what he
left behind, creatively speaking, rises to the level of the religious, in this
reader’s humble opinion.
Annette
Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also the Associate Editor
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
