Hey Jack Kerouac

So in this morning's New York Times, David Brooks writes a column about 'On the Road' turning 50. His main point is how the viewpoints of critics has changed over the years. He writes:

In the Times review that launched the book, Gilbert Millstein raved that “On the Road” was a frenzied search for affirmation, a book that rejected the ennui, pessimism and cynicism of the Lost Generation. The heroes of the book savored everything, enjoyed everything, took pleasure in everything.

However, Brooks says that that was "before the great geriatric pall settled over the world". Now critics are consumed with " the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus", and write things such as:

“Kerouac was this deep, lonely, melancholy man,” Hilary Holladay of the University of Massachusetts told The Philadelphia Inquirer. ”And if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page.”

Brooks goes further:

Students are taught “On the Road” in class, then must write tightly organized, double-spaced term papers on it, and if they don’t get an A, it hurts their admissions prospects. The book is still talked about, but often by professional intellectuals in panel discussions and career-building journal articles...

If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troop that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.

He concludes with:

The only thing we know for sure is that this ethos won’t last. Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.


'On the road' is a book I haven't read, at least to completion (I owned a copy at one point, and it may still be on a book shelf somewhere). I was both too young (10 in 1957) and too old (never on a curriculum that I studied).

Not sure if Brook's prediction will hold, although this is pretty much a non-political column, he is one of the Times' conservative editorial columnist, so I'd hate to agree with him -- but my 21 year old son Tommy may be a precursor of the next Jack Kerouac. Currently living on a sailboat and working as a bike messenger in San Francisco -- he already has many stories to tell and I am always curious as to what will happen next. He is not like the other Dixons: his older brother Alex, like his parents, completed college in 4 years and we all have had more-or-less convential middle class jobs and lifestyles (and yes, Virginia, Alex drives a Prius).

Tommy may never write the next great American Novel, but he may be living a version of it. Since Lynn worries about him, I'll close with Natalie Merchant (b. 1963, so maybe she had to studied it in college):

Hey Jack Kerouac
I think of your mother...