My rating: 10/10
Before finally getting round to it, I'd been wanting to read On The Road for a while because I'd been told a lot of great things about it - most particularly by one of my music heroes, Bob Dylan, who said "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's," so thanks for that one Bob. I'd never read a book of this genre or style before so I was very eager to see if I'd like it (and as you can probably guess by the rating I gave it - I loved it).
Throughout the entire book, I was completely immersed in the energy and passion it holds. Sal and Dean's desire to find 'it' and the answers to questions larger than life maintained a constant narrative thrust that lasted in even times of gloom. Whilst the book is arguably about failed dreams and the inability to find those all important answers, the consistent passion to keep trying is one which I find truly admirable.
Beyond the actual content, another aspect of the novel that kept me hooked was Kerouac's unique prose style. The whole book feels like a mad rush to get to the next journey and the next destination, as a result of which I found it really difficult to put it down as I was constantly wanting to race off with it. Whilst some might consider it to be too rushed, I would disagree entirely - it is a fascinating prose style, encapsulating an oral story-telling style like passing on a legend. It is one of the many intriguing features which have allowed this novel to be deemed a classic, and which established Kerouac as the leading author of the Beat Movement. His writing also shows the great influence of 1940s American jazz music, not so much through its semantic content as through the grammatical and syntactical manipulation of prose. He frequently uses sentences that form entire paragraphs and paragraphs that last for well over a page, which allow for a fast-paced narrative resembling an endless jazz solo, in which full stops are nothing more than a quick breath, ready to continue blasting it out.
As a roman à clef, I found it fascinating to read this 'fictional' tale whilst learning a lot about Kerouac's own life and his experiences with travelling across America, and his iconic involvement in the Beat Movement (to which he gave its name years earlier). His/Sal's life is one of great spontaneity and excitement, providing a sense of escapism which stretches beyond the fictional life of Sal Paradise and into the real world of Kerouac's own life, introducing the reader to the exhilarating lifestyle possessed by many in the late 1940s when the novel was written.
I was quite overwhelmed by the impact that On The Road had on me. Just days after finishing it I can already see the influence that it has had on me through my own writing. I've been revisiting my favourite parts to read back over and will undoubtedly soon be buying another Kerouac novel. I can tell that this will most likely be one of the most important books of my youth (or at least certainly of the next few years); one which I will definitely read again in the future for inspiration.
To finish this post, I thought I'd conclude with a quote from The New Yorker who, just after the novel was published, described it as:
"The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."
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