Word: kerouacs
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DESOLATION ANGELS by Jack Kerouac. 366 pages. Coward-McCann...
...those who dropped out after, say, On the Road, The Subterraneans or The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is remembered as a likable literary wild man, a frightener of librarians, a pie-eyed piper for young men with no socks. Perhaps because socklessness no longer seems the major menace (the young are activists now, not beatniks), Kerouac, at 43, appears mild and gentle. The effectiveness of Kerouac's prose is as erratic as before, but the woozy mid-sentence plunges from eloquence to incompetence are no longer embarrassing. It is understood-theses are written on the subject-that Kerouac refuses...
...Most of Kerouac's novels are about the adventures of the author in various disguises, and this one (in which he bears the name Duluoz) fills in the Kerouac chronicle for the period just before On the Road was published. As the novel begins, the author is finishing a two-month squat as a fire watcher on a mountain in Washington. The mountain across the valley from Kerouac's cabin, when seen from upside down, looks like a "hanging bubble in the illimitable ocean of space." Why is it seen from upside down? Because the author is doing...
This earnest, hopeless, engaging goofiness is the best of Kerouac, and it runs through the novel. His writing is successful because it is a sly parody of his boyishness. His books are a tall tale told at his own expense, and always at a decent remove from the truth. Duluoz-Kerouac fornicates, hops a freight, smokes pot, drinks a quart, sleeps unscathed. He is a bumbling Paul Bunyan working with blue bull...
...that life at Harvard is for from boxing. Harvard is a land of tigers, transcendentalists, renaissance leaders, and seducers. My image of myself is revitalized. Now I'm a bold rebel against morality and society, now a figure in an Intellectual renaissance; now I'm Jack Kerouac, now Lorenzo de Medici. The old routine beckons irresistably ahead