Wednesday, September 5, 2007

On the Road (again)

As mentioned last month, the marathon reading of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" takes place in Lowell TODAY.

Yesterday, Slate published the first installment of a Book Club exchange between Walter Kirn and Meghan O'Rourke about "On The Road." O'Rourke, who read the book for the first time recently, says:

The radical innovation -- and I do think it was radical, however flawed the book itself may be -- was that the story doesn't end when Sal Paradise gets to San Francisco, or even when he gets back to New Jersey to his aunt's house. It just keeps on going -- as he crisscrosses the continent time and again, watching his peers fall apart (Remi Boncouer) or get married, divorced, and remarried (Dean Moriarty) all while witnessing in himself the growth of something that can't be altered, some hunger that, it becomes apparent, will not be appeased.... This isn't just a jolly quest for "kicks" and beautiful girls and good times to be had at cheap prices. It's a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to -- the famous search for "IT," a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found.

Yep! It's true, folks. "On the Road" is not an account of a roadtrip, but a religious pilgrimage, one made after the death of God, in a decentered universe. Speaking of which, did you catch ex-Ideas columnist James Parker's Phoenix cover story about hitch-hiking to Lowell? Spoiler alert: He doesn't succeed!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:22 AM

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