Review by New York Times Review
TWENTY years ago, like so many slack 17-year-olds before and since, I devoured "On the Road" and it devoured me. The pages of my copy were dog-eared, -nosed and - throated, and I was beholden to the book in ways I can't quite believe now. Did I really go for midnight drives down by the ruined flour mills with the tape deck blaring Dexter Gordon? Did I really attend a high school costume dance dressed as Jack Kerouac? I know for sure - because proof exists - that the year I graduated I chose this bit of the novel's last paragraph as my yearbook entry: "And nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old." By the time I left for college, the book's spell had begun to fade. Late that summer, a dreamy friend asked me to join him in Landmark Forum, the successor to EST, Werner Erhard's New Age group seminars. We stood under a streetlight near dawn and argued about it: it had made a real difference to him; to me it seemed a woozy retreat from the world. I had "On the Road" in my bag, as I always did. When we had run out of things to say I gave it to him. He seemed so much to need it; I thought I no longer did. Who needs it now? The New York Times reporter John Leland thinks we all do. "Beneath its wild yea-saying," Leland writes, "'On the Road' is a book about how to live your life." Leland is an amiable and at times instructive guide to "On the Road," making his way through the book to reveal what he calls its "lessons" on work, love, art and religion. He rightly argues that the book is as much about bookish Sal as crazy Dean, that grief and atonement lie at the core of the story, and that low overhead and a sense of improvisation make for a good life. But his efforts to find contemporary relevance in "On the Road" sometimes sound like parody: "Who are Sal and Dean if not two fatherless inner-city males who get profiled by the police, bend the queen's English and largely ignore their baby mamas (in Dean's case)? What could be more hip-hop?" This is Post-it note criticism. And the whole book is couched in the rhetoric of soft-focus advertorials and self-help books. He writes of "the 'On the Road' diet" and "the [Sal] Paradise Career Plan," and encourages readers to embrace such lessons of the book as "network for success." He even introduces this hoary catchphrase: Sal's "7 Habits of Highly Beat People." Can we have a moratorium on chapter titles that riff on sitcoms ("The Family Guy") and pop argot ("What Would Jack Do?")? Still, Leland makes a solid case for Kerouac's essential conservatism, and argues that much of the mutual bitterness between beatniks and Kerouac stemmed from their misguided beliefs about the book and the man who wrote it. "However headlong their steps into the unknown, Sal and Dean are traditionalists, looking to connect with old forms, not slay them." Taking a cue from a conservative Christian account of the novel, he declares that "maybe Kerouac's legacy is not Woodstock and Dockers but Costa Mesa and Christian rock." In the end Leland's book begins to feel as if it's missing the road for the gravel and tar. What matters about "On the Road" is the book's raw energy yoked to its sense of promise in "all that raw land," the shove it offers to get out of one's own chair and see what lies over the horizon. As Dean says on reaching San Francisco: "Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can't go any further 'cause there ain't no more land!" And on heading back east: "Let's go, let's not stop - go now! Yes!" The book is a hymn to purposelessness, an antidote to what John Fowles once decried as our modern "addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield" in everything we do. Above all, "On the Road" matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy optimism and a yearning for solace a thousand times richer and subtler than the mournful sap that drips down from so many contemporary American films and novels. It's the lovely ache in the writing of Sherwood Anderson and Arthur Miller, in the cracked voices of Jeff Tweedy and Paul Westerberg. This is the great, lasting appeal of "On the Road," the reason it will continue to matter to readers for another half-century and more. It's the reason I'm glad I've got another copy, its pages already creased and its spine broken - and it's the reason I won't be giving this one away. Among the lessons of 'On the Road,' Leland writes, is this: Low overhead and a sense of improvisation make for a good life. Matt Weiland is the deputy editor of The Paris Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* On the Road is a book about how to live your life, writes Leland, the author of Hip (2004), in this sometimes arch, always discerning, and occasionally full-out brilliant reconsideration of a novel loved and maligned for all the wrong reasons. Leland carefully parses the inspiration Kerouac drew from Goethe, Melville, Twain, and Proust; charts the novel's jazz-based circular structure; and perceptively analyzes Kerouac's mystical Catholicism and exalted artistic mission. But most importantly, Leland interprets On the Road as a set of parables in which Sal Paradise (based on Kerouac himself) and Dean Moriarty (an improvisation on Neal Cassady, Kerouac's main muse and the devil incarnate) embody opposite approaches to existence. For these two seekers, one in search of God, the other on the prowl for sex, the road is a penance, not an adventure. As Leland shrewdly explicates the novel's spiritual teachings within dynamic social commentary, he links Kerouac to such antithetical realms as the Christian Right and hip-hop, boldly recalibrating our understanding of an artist as immensely conflicted as he was gifted.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Having immersed himself in Beat culture while writing Hip: A History, Leland, a New York Times reporter and former editor-in-chief of Details, makes a convincing case that Jack Kerouac's most famous novel has endured for half a century because it's "a book about how to live your life." The lesson isn't about impulsive self-gratification, as many readers believe, aided by Kerouac's tendency to go vague in his most emotionally critical passages. Leland reminds us that narrator Sal Paradise was always looking to settle down into a conventional life, and Kerouac, Leland says, was generally of a conservative mindset. Framing On the Road as a spiritual quest, Leland deftly combines the biographical facts of Kerouac's life with discussions of his literary antecedents in Melville and Goethe, as well as the inspiration he took from contemporary jazz, finding in bebop's rhythms a new way to circle around a story's themes. Section headings like "The 7 Habits of Highly Beat People" get a little silly, but Leland's insights provide new layers of significance even for those familiar with the novel. (Aug. 20) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
On the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, New York Times reporter Leland (Hip: The History) provides a fresh, thought-provoking examination of the Jack Kerouac classic. He explores the novel's themes of male friendship, love and death, family values, jazz, and religion and argues that narrator Sal Paradise's road trips with saintly fool Dean Moriarty constitute an inward journey leading to manhood and maturity. Drawing on Kerouac's own letters and journals as well as on the work of earlier biographers, Leland discusses Kerouac's use of autobiography, focusing on the role of the novel's narrator. He notes that where Sal Paradise succeeds, Kerouac too often fails. Leland's book is one of the first to take advantage of the availability of the original scroll typescript of Kerouac's novel for comparison with the 1957 volume. (Viking will be releasing On the Road: The Original Scroll simultaneously with the novel's anniversary edition.) Written in an informal, accessible style, it will appeal to Kerouac fans as well as academics. Highly recommended for all literature collections.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A pop-culture trifle that tries too hard to make its already accessible subject au courant among the 20-somethings. New York Times style reporter Leland (Hip: The History, 2004) clearly has good intentions in this celebration of the inventor of middle-class white cool (or was that Sinatra?) and good instincts in pointing out the ironies hidden in Jack Kerouac's invention. But it does not do to strive for hipness when discussing such weighty matters, and Leland's prose often falls into a kind of chattiness that would have driven its subject to mad repudiations: "The big kahuna for any god-aspiring novelist is the question of death"; "On the Road is often blamed for America's ongoing goatee problem, but the book is in fact clean-shaven. Kerouac disdained chin spinach, especially on white dudes." Leland's subject has been dead for nearly 40 years, the book that made him famous half a century old now, and the ironies mount: Kerouac was conservative, racist, closeted and a champion of Falwellian family values who "managed a lasting female relationship only with his mother, who supported his writing even as she disapproved of the lives he wrote about." He was a wild celebrant of drugs and booze, hung out with Ginsberg and Burroughs, yet voted for Goldwater. So what are the life lessons to be drawn from the man and his book? Leland offers "Sal's 7 Habits of Highly Beat People," the Sal in question being of course Kerouac's alterego: "Stay on schedule (Tip: don't let jobs get in the way)," "Sell in, not out," and so on; but too little of his book supports his thesis that On the Road is about how to live. A harmless enough entertainment, but vaporous and rather frivolous--an attempt, one suspects, to ride the crest of an anniversary wave that has yet to take shape. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
