I wanted to like this book, but sadly – despite its brevity – I couldn’t get through it.
First, there are the simple editing errors. On page 17, for example, we have a Jean Louis Kerouac being born in Lowell as opposed to the Jean-Louis Kérouac, (or even – as he later referred to himself -- Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac. A hyphen and accent mark may be small mistakes, I’ll grant you, but they are indicative of a general lack of rigor.
So, for example, on the same page we have On the Road described as the, “ … the first of its kind to give a prosaic voice to the free spirited subculture that was on the rise in America and would unpreventably take on a political agenda as it matured…”
Let’s set aside the torturing of the perfectly innocent adjective unpreventable. In fact let’s set aside the whole question of whether the sentiment contained in the sentence is, in some version of a Hegelian imperative, true or not.
Instead, let’s look at the word prosaic. If the author is using prosaic to indicate that On the Road is in fact a work of prose, he is factually correct. I suppose you can argue what the first, “true,” Beat novel is, but it clearly isn’t On the Road which didn’t appear until 1957. “First of its kind,” honors would more likely go to books like John Clellon Holmes’ Go or Chandler Brossard’s Who Walks in Darkness, both of which appeared in 1952. Perhaps the author meant on of the other definitions of prosaic such as, “commonplace,” or perhaps, “unromantic,” which would be equally wrong.
On Page 2 the author refers to Tom Wolf’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas not as examples of, “New Journalism,” and “Gonzo Journalism,” which they are, but as, “novels,” which they clearly aren’t.
As to the connection between the Beats and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization noted on Page 12, it struck me as eerily familiar. I assume it was, “borrowed,” from Paul Whiston of Sheffield University’s paper, The Working Class Beats: a Marxist Analysis of Beat Writing and Culture from the Fifties to the Seventies, although unhappily for both Whiston and the erudite reader, neither the author, nor the work – which is well worth a look – is cited.
A footnote found on Page 84 to a reference to Lucien Carr on Page 19 tells us Carr, “found some success as a straight journalist.” I guess you might say that. In fact, he joined United Press, later United Press International, as a copyboy, and spent 47 years there. He ended up heading the general news desk until his retirement in 1993. I guess that would count as, “some,” success.
And that’s when I stopped reading. I know the author wasn’t trying to pass this off as an exhaustive work, or even a scholarly study. But, still, he should have either had an editor or done his homework.
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mike sweeney
Read this, and learn.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2017