Word: kerouac
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...Beat Generation is not without cultural ancestors. In the beginning there was Edna St. Vincent Millay, burning her candle at both ends. And then there was Hemingway and the Lost Generation squirting wine sacks at each other. But beside Kerouac's band, they are all pickers. They were never "beatifically beat," as are On the Road's "... mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding...
...Paradise, an ex-GI college student, writer, and all-American Beat Generator, is the narrator of Kerouac's tale. On the Road begins, naturally enough, with Sal on Route 6 outside New York, hitch-hiking to Denver...
...Kerouac has taken the slightly less than original idea that life is like a road and given it an indisputably original twist by using a U. S. road map for most of the plot, and a Mexican map for the rest of it. Everything happens while the characters are physically on the move and nothing every happens when they stop. Outside of pure motion, there is no development of anything. Whenever some danger of a little drama through which personal relationships or just plain personalities might be explored develops, Kerouac drops the situation...
...series of faces and scenery flashing by along the road. As a tour through modern America's bohemia, the book is amusing and entertaining. There are plenty of weird characters to titillate you a la Auntie Mame. But like any sight-seeing excursion, it is also very tiring. Even Kerouac seems to tire of spending a paragraph or two on people who sit around shooting benzedrine tubes at each other with an air gun. Toward the end of the book he contents himself with describing one party by listing names: "'Dean?' I yelled across the party--which included Angel...
...journalistic approach will doubtless make the book valuable as source material for sociologists some twenty or thirty years hence, but it precludes any appreciable literary achievements. Such a technique fits descriptions of American cities and landscapes much better, and it is here that Kerouac occasionally is not bad reading. But Thomas Wolfe did all that much better, for he at least knew when to let a scene carry him along by its own weight and happily didn't feel obliged to punctuate the description with "Ah's" and "Oh's" or "Wild man; Wild...