Should you read this book? Well, to quote Jack Kerouac himself, “I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference."What inspired me to read Big Sur, which I somehow skipped in all earlier Kerouac stints, was Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar's 2009 LP: One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. If you've not heard about the album, its genesis was Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas requesting songwriter Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) to compose some songs based on the Big Sur text for the soundtrack of a documentary film attempting to depict the period of Kerouac's life when he was dogged by the celebrity resulting from the big sales success of On The Road, trying to quit drinking and writing this novel. According to Noel Murray's review of the album in the A.V. Club, the original intention was for a variety of name musicians to perform Farrar's compositions with him, but he clicked so well with Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) in preliminary production that the two of them completed all 12 tracks. The album is a damned fine listen in my opinion, but it’s the title track—which I believe I read somewhere is more a Gibbard than Farrar composition—that manages to illuminate something quintessential about my perceptions of Kerouac, particularly the Kerouac of this final novel who can look back on all the excesses and holy goofs from the roads of his erstwhile youth and wonder if it was all worth it. As far as I can tell, the only line in the song's lyric that comes from Big Sur is the title/chorus ("one fast move or I'm gone"), but all the other words ring true to the Kerouac I see in my mind's eye after having read seven of his novels and (a long time ago) Ann Charters' biography. Listen to at least the title track yourself, paying close attention to the words. Whether it was Gibbard or Farrar (or both) who wrote them, they really hit upon what I see as the core of Kerouac. During one of my earliest times listening to the song, I found myself thinking of the beautifully turned close of the first chapter in Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, where a third person narrative voice, rarely if ever used in Kerouac's later work, describes the exterior of the Martin family's house: "When all the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off in the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the wind swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn—you could stand in old Galloway Road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever."I'm not trying to romanticize the man. That has been done to death way before Gap used an airbrushed version of one of Jerry Yulsman's Kerouac photos to move units, before a living William Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial ("Who couldn't use such easy money, kid, I'm hustling myself," I can almost hear him croak in defense), in other words, before American commerce learned to pimp hip so hard that anyone foolish enough to be a true believer was left to wonder whether they missed the bang or whimper that had heralded everything cool tipping over into a vat of meretricious shit. But that too is a case of "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." More on that in a minute.What I am trying to say is that the man could write and write well when he put his mind to it. One of the most important things a writer can do, besides tell a story, is make a reader feel something. And few writers can make me feel loneliness like Kerouac could. Similar to what Burroughs has written about Hemingway and the subject of death, loneliness was Kerouac's thing, his specialty. Sure, you find a fair share of exhilarating headlong rushes into life that "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding" in Kerouac's body of work but is it that much of a stretch to imagine those were inspired by the desire to take flight from a haunting inherent loneliness? And, I think, it's when his prose strives to convey the bedrock loneliness of the human condition—or at least his condition—that it really takes off to a place beyond ultimately predictable descriptions of what it feels like to be on the passenger side of car expertly driven at breakneck speeds.Having decided to read Big Sur, I went online and bought a used copy of the original 1963 Bantam Books paperback edition (original cover price-75¢!). The synopsis blurb on the cover page is at least 75 cents worth of hilarity. Consider the following: A NIGHTMARE SUMMERDULUOZ—The King of the Beatniks—tortured, broken idol of a whole generation; great modern sex god who just wanted to be alone with his cat; all-time boozer of the century who was slowly drinking himself out of his mind.BILLIE—his fashion-model mistress who knew every dirty trick in the book. Duluoz was her man, meal ticket and stud rolled up into one, and she wasn't going to let him get away from her no matter what! ELLIOT—Billie's son—he saw things that would make any adult flinch.ANDBIG SUR—the lonely, wild surf-pounded shore where Duluoz went to hide; where the world tracked him down and made its final attempt to destroy him.Clearly the boys in the marketing division of Bantam Paperback Books thought it best to reduce anything that might have been authentic, original, artistic or (god help us) hip about the novel to teaser copy that reads like it would have been more at home on a poster for a B-movie horror flick. This is what I meant by "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." The ad executives from a couple of yesteryears ago thought people could be swayed to buy Gap clothes if they were associated with the images of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac. Further back in '63 apparently some creepy Don Draper types thought the best way to sell Jack Kerouac’s final novel was to render an overview of it in third rate Mickey Spillane type bombast.But, I can hear you asking through clenched teeth at this point, what did you think of the goddamned novel? When I told several people I planned to read it, I was warned that it’s a bleak, unsparing “breakdown” novel and that Kerouac would take me right along with him. That’s true enough.(view spoiler)[ Yet for all the time Kerouac seemed to devote to working on his own unique style (his "spontaneous bop prosody," which was a double edged sword just as likely to turn him into a silly flibbertigibbet as help him produce searing, evocative prose), I get the sense that he didn’t spend too much time thinking about the structures into which he flaunted his style. Many chapters before the breakdown really manifests itself in his behavior, he makes numerous references to its pending arrival, so it comes off as less poignant and less visceral—to me—than it might have had it been allowed to gradually build with scant foreshadowing. Even so, as the book’s “plot” descended fully into Kerouac/Duluoz’s paranoia and delusion, I sensed an organic acceleration to the pace as if we were zooming ever faster toward a horrible crash. The description of his dream of the “vulture people” near the end is so weird and repulsive that—as another Goodreads review of this book mentioned—you absolutely don’t buy the “and then I woke up to find that I, and everything else, was just fine and dandy and golden” ending. (hide spoiler)]
Revisiting a beloved author can be terrifying. It’s been a full ten years since I first discovered Kerouac. A lot can change in a decade.A few years back, my girlfriend and I went on a road trip. We both wanted to see San Francisco for the first time. It was all great fun. On the way up, we stopped in Big Sur for baked goods and coffee at a small hippyish establishment. I was struck by the beauty of the place and realized that it was somewhere I’d like to spend some time.A couple of years after that, I was traveling with that same gal in the days after we’d gotten married. It was our plan to visit San Francisco again for a more prolonged period (a stay that resulted in my visiting City Lights and the Beat Museum) and to have a night or two in Big Sur. Unfortunately for us, Big Sur was on fire at the time and was evacuated. So now it’s a few years after that. It’s somewhere around midnight and I’m sitting in a modest motel room in Big Sur with that wife of mine and the two beautiful girls our time together has resulted in. We’ve been here for two days and will be hitting the road tomorrow. As I’d planned, I brought along Big Sur for a second reading in the place itself. I wanted to read Kerouac’s words in the place that inspired them. To say that I was worried would be an understatement. What if he got it all wrong? What if it was all stream-of-consciousness bullshit? What if, as I have come to suspect, eighteen-year-old me was a fucking moron?As it happens, my fears were unnecessary. The book, as I thought the first time, is brilliant. Kerouac’s writing hits me in the chest with enough force to leave me breathless. I can rest assured that, to this day, he is writing just for me.Right in the beginning, as he is first rolling in to Big Sur, he goes off on a rant about people like me. Men traveling with their families and staying in hotels; men who bring with them changes of clothes and credit cards. His contempt is quite obvious. I’m not offended, though. I don’t share Kerouac’s romanticism in regard to hitchhiking or sleeping ‘neath the stars. This beginning of the book didn’t strike me as interesting until the final quarter.Kerouac was scared of being me. There was something about family that he simply couldn’t handle. It was sad, really. He was so connected to his mother and his cats, but would never let anyone else get close enough to him. As much as he liked to isolate himself, he was very clearly a social being. The women he loved and the children he fathered were left behind simply because of his Woody-Allen-esque neuroses. The paranoia he seemed to feel at the thought of being necessary to someone else’s well-being was incredibly frustrating. He constantly pushes away his friends and lovers, only to miss them when they’re gone. In his writing, he speaks so often of heaven when surrounded by people, but fixates on hell when he’s been around them too long.At the end of this book (and I don’t mind talking about it because nobody reads Kerouac for plot), the man freaks out, thinking in his madness that his lover is a demon, her child is evil, and his friends are witches. All of this happens in his head. I guess I never realized how near the end of his career this one must have been written (I’d google it, but this Internet connection is as spotty as you might expect). The thoughts he experiences in the stifling Big Sur night are the same ones he went through at the end of his life, when he barricaded himself in his mother’s house and waited to die. The resulting narrative is incredibly sad, as it gives a revealing glimpse into his life at the end.So much about Big Sur itself works its way into the story. The forest and ocean both play significant parts in the drama of his degradation. The sunlight through the trees can drive him to an ecstasy that his wine is unable to deliver, while the crash of the waves can leave him shivering and afraid. Multiple times he talks about how Big Sur inspires a profound sense of fear in him. It ranges from the childish fixation on the woods in the dark, but extends into a sort of living breathing metaphor for a vengeful god. Kerouac delivers himself into his own private hell that looks a whole lot like Eden. By the book’s final pages, Kerouac has left Big Sur three times. Each time he visits, he’s filled with awe. After just a few days, he’s burning with an urge to get the fuck out of the place. Having been here for that period of time, I completely understand what he’s so freaked out by. While he was in Big Sur, Kerouac was dying. And the forest didn’t give a holy shit. We visited the beach yesterday and by the time we decided to leave, the gusts of wind had almost entirely covered our tracks in the sand. The place is ancient and feels that way. It makes one feel inconsequential.I am grateful for my time here and the opportunity to read one of my favorite novels in a new light. I’m glad to know that while Kerouac has a whole lot to offer naïve college students, he also has a lot to impart on people a little more skeptical. Next stop Lowell.
What do You think about Big Sur (1992)?
Well, this book starts off quite interestingly, with Kerouac apparently aiming to write his own version of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Quite intriguing, I thought. He is also funny and sardonic about the success of On the Road and the experience of becoming a cult figure among teenagers when he was actually approaching forty! However, at some point not too far into this book, he lapses back into his On the Road persona, interspersing accounts of car journeys with accounts of drinking bouts and generally disappearing up his own backside whenever he thinks he's being philosophical. While his friend Cody has settled down with a family and a job, Kerouac is trying to recapture their youthful enthusiasm for bumming around and talking shite. It's all a bit sad, really. You can see how it came about that Kerouac finally drank himself to death because, although he exhibits the stylistic potential to become a great writer, he unfortunately doesn't have anything to say.That sounds harsh. But a few interesting ideas and a handful of brilliant sentences do not a novel make. :(
—Kathy
So far, too flowery/romancticy language (the sea can't talk to you asshole, it's water; put down the bottle...). What a drunk pussy...Whining about bats getting stuck in his hair? Jesus, be a man for Chrissake... (never mind that moth that made me scream like a little girl last night when I tried to swat it out of my bedroom)...I hope this is a story of a 40 year old man-child coming to age and becoming a man at 40. That is what I really want...Maybe Kerouac isn't drinking enough? I cant tell if its worse when he is drinking or not drinking... Not enough focus on the story, but forcing this flowery language shit. What is all this talk about ghosts, what a fuckin' hippie...and these vague references to other literary figures to make us think he is cultured and not a drunk dick...The writing is weak and flimsy right now. Not engaging me at all really (not getting sucked in really). Reminds me of a hipster Thoreau book (Walden specifically). Boring...Where is the self awareness??? Where is the humor??? Make fun of yourself for being a giant pussy, city boy!!!! Boring so far... The writing is what you would suspect from a drunk hippie: weak stabs at profound thought scattered with spurts of storyline not following any clear, coherent thought nor plot (much like this review)... Will see. Stay tuned. I have faith...These are snap judgements, I will be patient...How did this guy write "On the Road"? This is a great decline in style. He should have stopped after "On the Road"....Where is the dynamics, depth, dimension!?!?! This illustrates that he was just a pop sensation...The book is dated. I am sure at one time running around looking like Jesus, smelling flowers, and talking about a Zen like life was considered "radical". The start of the hippies... Nowadays, this is as common as apple pie and baseball. You are almost considered a "freak" if you don't have a beard and go to yoga every Tuesday of the month. Everything sucks now...Chapt 21 was a surprise. The mood has gotten depressing and the writing a bit better..He is old and grumpy here...I give him one extra star because he was old, bitter, and jaded.Norman Mailer was right about Kerouac: “Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollipop.” Thank you Mailer!Quotes:"Besides I can see from glancing at him that becoming a writer holds no interest for him because life is so holy for him there's no need to do anything but live it, writing's just an afterthought or a scratch anyway at the surface."
—Jonathon
A great book about the demons of Jack Kerouac. If the reader doesn’t know anything about Kerouac and/or had never read any of this books, this novel will not have the same meaning. Having personally read some of his books, especially the Dharma Bums, If found this book to very interesting, and like nothing else I had read. It’s basically about Jack, in 1960, trying to deal with his fame being known as the most famous beatnik. As we know now, he really looked at himself as more of an author than a leader of the beatniks and would rather had people read his books than idolize him as the paragon of beatnik ways…ala drinking, womanizing, traveling and partying. Throughout the book he chastises himself for the way he has lived. He also drinks heavily which weighs heavy on his psyche and outlook on life. It’s hard to tell exactly when the DT's get him but believe me, he’s gottem in this book. I don’t want to say what it is, but it leads to a classic bit of prose, near the end, that makes the novel all worthwhile and displays the true brilliance of Kerouac. He seems to act like a bit of a jerk in the book but he’s totally aware of it. I unique and introspective self-study by a man who finds himself in turmoil from living his life in excess.
—Joel Lacivita
