It is impossible to imagine why any reader would enjoy this book unless they too long for Neal Cassady to tickle their prostate.  This wretched exercise in homoerotic mythopoetics is almost
exclusively based on Kerouac's infatuation with Cassady, a by-all-accounts beautiful young man who was, meanwhile, little more than a bisexual, car-stealing, alcoholic, drug-addled punk.

Towards the end of the book, as Kerouac lies ill in Mexico and Cassady, quickie divorce from his wife in hand, abandons him to head back to New York & marry anew, we can't help feeling that Kerouac's gotten what he deserved.

But the epitaph for this "novel" must, inevitably, be Truman Capote's brilliant bon mot, On the Road "isn't writing; it's typing."  An immensely stupid and unwarrantedly respected piece of dreck.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (F) Orrin C. Judd

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Jack Kerouac Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Jack Kerouac
    -AUDIO: Jack Kerouac reads On The Road Audiobook with English subtitles: 28-minute recitation by Jack Kerouac from his book On the Road that was recorded on an acetate disc in the 1950s but thought lost for decades, and had only recently been rediscovered at the time of release September 14, 1999. (YouTube)
    -
    -ESSAY: Irregular Beats: The Surprising Politics of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg (Robert Dean Lurie, 04/30/2024, Merion West)
    -ESSAY: The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous (Ronald K.L. Collins, December 13, 2019, Washington Post)
    -ESSAY: Who was the most right-wing member of the Beat Generation?: On the Abbeys and the Beats (Bill Kauffman, July 16, 2022, The Spectator)
    -ESSAY: Jack Kerouac at 100: Part 1 (of 2): On his 100th birthday, I consider whether the King of the Beats still speaks to us today—or is just a dated relic of a hipster past (Ted Gioia, Mar 11, 2022, the honest Broker)
    -ESSAY: Jack Kerouac: still roadworthy after 100 years: The author of On the Road had a messy, contradictory life. Yet he’s as relevant as ever – and not just for obsessed young men (David Barnett, 13 Mar 2022, The Observer)
    -ESSAY: Kerouac's lifelong love of baseball (Dan Cichalski, March 11, 2022, MLB)
    -ESSAY: On and off the road: Jack Kerouac’s reputation should rest on his whole oeuvre — not just his most famous novel (Malcolm Forbes, 3/12/22, The Critic)
    -ESSAY: Time for Jack Kerouac to hit the road: He and the Beats aren’t nearly as good as annoying young men imagine (Francesca Peacock, March 11, 2022, The Spectator)
    -ESSAY: What Can We Learn From Jack Kerouac’s Archives?: The writer would have been 100 this week (Tobias Carroll, 3/11/22, Inside Hook)
    -ESSAY: Kerouac at 100: He led readers to bohemian rhapsodies, then Buddhism (Randy Rosenthal, March 10, 2022, American Scholar)
    -ESSAY: The failure of Jack Kerouac: The king of the counterculture ended up a reactionary (PARK MACDOUGALD, March 2022, UnHerd)
    -ESSAY: John Clellon Holmes on the Funeral of His Longtime Friend Jack Kerouac: “I hoped that no one would ever mourn me so self-centeredly.” (John Clellon Holmes, March 11, 2022, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: On the Centenary of Jack Kerouac’s Birth, Rarely Seen Archival Material from His Publisher: “You are right in thinking I am interested in Kerouac and his work.” (Literary Hub, March 11, 2022)
    -ESSAY: Jack Kerouac’s Journey: For On the Road’s author, whose centenary is this month, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote. (Joyce Johnson, March 2, 2022, NY Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Why Kerouac's Anti-Semitism Matters: How to read an unlikely reactionary. 9Christopher Orlet, 1/13/22, Hedgehog Review)
    -ESSAY: “On the Road,” Again (John Tottenham, MARCH 12, 2021, LA Review of Books)
    -ALBUM REVIEW: Jack Kerouac: Poetry for the Beat Generation/Blues and Haikus (Will Pinfold, Spectrum Culture)
    -

Book-related and General Links:
    -Biographical Sketch
    -Dharma Beat (ezine)
    -Kerouac Links
    -ARCHIVES : "Jack Kerouac" (Salon)
    -AUDIO : "On the Road" By Jack Kerouac
    -ESSAY: In the Kerouac Archive (Douglas Brinkley, The Atlantic)
    -REVIEW:  Ladder to Nirvana: A review of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (Phoebe Lou Adams, The Atlantic, O C T O B E R   1 9 5 7)
    -Flashback: Kerouac and the Beats (The Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: KEROUAC AT THE END OF THE ROAD (Richard Hill. NY Times Book Review)
    -ESSAY: Desolation Angel  Ann Douglas finds the road less traveled in Jack Kerouac's latest volume of letters, which documents the novelist's rise to fame and the horrors of being constantly misunderstood. (Ann Douglas, VLS)
    -ESSAY : Kerouac's estate is full of surprises (HILLEL ITALIE, August 22, 2001, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
    -ESSAY : A glimpse of Kerouac's famous 'scroll'  Original 'On the Road' hits the road this week (David Kipen, SF Chronicle)
    -REVIEW : of Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac (Jeffrey Bartlett, SF Chronicle)
    -REVIEW: The Only People for Him The Portable Jack Kerouac and Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters (Ralph Lombreglia, The Atlantic)

Buck:

No, moral relativism is your philosophy, not that of most of us. These aren't post-modern times, nor even modern. We're an antiquated nation and fortunately so.

- oj

- Feb-06-2006, 22:08

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oj:

I guess I'm just a lost college kid. Fortunately for me I'm not persecuted for my views. Hopefully you will never have any power in this country. We don't need another Hitler...

- Tim

- May-11-2005, 16:42

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Tim:

Easily deceived, aren't you?

- oj

- May-08-2005, 20:06

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oj:

On the road is not an autoboigraphy. It is a loosely translated story of Jack Kerouac's life. If you read the novel you will realize that Jack Kerouac's name is never mentioned. He is always referred to as Sal, and Neal Cassady is always called Dean Moriarty. THE NOVEL IS NOT TRUE, THAT'S WHY IT IS A NOVEL.

- Tim

- May-08-2005, 19:10

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When I "grow up" I will hope my children read this book as well only so that they can be impacted in the way this book has impacted people for 50 years. This book was written for a generation of people who lived during World War II, when pieces like On The Road were considered offensive. I'm sorry, but if you consider Kerouac a bad novelist, then you probably consider Hemingway a bad one too. Go to college and take a literature class... you don't know what you're talking about.

- Garvan

- May-08-2005, 18:28

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Being a college student, On the Road has had a large impact on my life. Your review does nothing but bash on an instance of individualism, and you don't back up your comments in any way. I'm sorry, but a half-decent book review in my opinion should contain more than four sentences. Your banner for your website contains what I assume is the two brothers in front of the American flag, but it seems you should change that to a confederate flag.

- Garvan

- May-08-2005, 14:15

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and what did you ever contribute to humanity, mr orrin whoever you are? apart from snide comments...

- alex

- Mar-28-2004, 16:46

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I agree that you should think about re-reading the book, but for a different reason. You of all people should have picked up on the fact that this is actually a deeply conservative book. Oh, yes. Each of Sal and Dean's journeys, which are so much fun while they are going on, end in disaster and misery. Finally, Sal realizes that he must leave Dean behind and enter the adult world. Here is a particularly illuminating passage: Snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

Despite Capote's famous dismissal, Kerouac is a talented enough writer to have fooled generations of critics and readers into remembering the intoxicating descriptions of the joys of the beginnings of each journey onto the road, rather than the brutal endings. The book wasn't meant as an inspiration. It was meant as a warning.

- brian

- Feb-13-2004, 22:23

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you are clearly an idiot

- ryan thompson

- Sep-17-2003, 14:52

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your 'review' of 'On the Road' by Kerouac is one of the most unjust pieces of written shit i have ever read! have you ever actually READ the book? The book is not about the escapaes of what you call 'drug-addled punks'. It is a book on the depth and wanting of the so-called 'American dream' - people who, like the rest of us are trying to make their way the best they can with what they have. The friendship between Sal and Dean is a tender one, but thereis no homosexuality - Sal admires the ferocity of the fire that burns within Dean, as he sees something in Deam's 'freedom' which is something Sal craves himself, though it becomes apparent that Dean really is not as free as Sal first thought, he is in fact, a lonely, sad, mad person in need of as much comfort as Sal himself. It is a wonderful book - the sad beauty of a life on the road is the perfect analogy for the travells we face through life. After all, we all at some point know someone like Dean - alight with joy and sadness for the place we live. Read it again.

- kharris@netmail.northox.ac.ukac.ukx

- Jun-04-2003, 10:03

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