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Book review: "On The Road"

An unfocused Peter Pan expresses his confused discontent with the purposelessness of his life by drifting back and forth across the country in the company of similarly addle-pated losers. His bone-deep narcissism allows him to remain convinced (despite all evidence to the contrary) that a succession of starvation-wage menial jobs, casual petty theft, abusive sexual relationships and escapist substance abuse is noble, heroic and illustrative of the inner workings of where it is so totally real, man, I mean like totally and on the upswing REAL.


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4 comments:

  1. Sick burn on one of the most self-indulgent members of the American non-fiction canon.

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  2. I'm listening to it in the car. This is probably a good thing, because if I were reading a physical copy of the book, I'd have thrown it across the room in disgust by now.

    The sad thing is that this spoke so strongly to a friend of mine that he structured his life to emulate it. Road trips, temps jobs, spurning the trappings of the bourgeois middle class, living out of a VW bus... neo-hippy affectations galore. At 23 this was bohemian and adventuresome and endlessly entertaining. At 42, much less so.

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  3. Wow, man. You, like, totally grooved the meaning of the thing. Far out.

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  4. I read and enjoyed Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Acid Kool-aid Test" and thought I should read - and would enjoy - the Kerouac writings. Alas, I never finished it. Thanks for ringing the gong!

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