On the Road

I’m supposed to think this is like God’s gift to prose, right? Well honestly, I’m left a little wanting. Ironically, two major themes of On the Road*—restlessness and dissatisfaction with what is in front of you—were two emotions I experienced mid-read. Now that I’ve really set this novel up for death-by-review, I’ll outline its plot, its shortcomings, and even some potential redeeming factors.

Similar to roman à clef novels I’ve reviewed in the past (The Things They Carried, The Rum Diary, Ham On Rye, and The Bell Jar), the characters in this story correspond to Kerouac’s real-life friends and the narrative reveals their actual adventures on the road from 1947 to 1950. The book follows Sal Paradise (Kerouac) as he embarks on several journeys to the West and eventually Mexico, making notable pit stops in San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. He is regularly accompanied by Dean Moriarty—the fictional version of Neal Cassady. Other memorable authors such as Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson also immortalize Cassady’s craziness in their own works. Clearly, I need to find better, cooler, famous author friends.

The original manuscript was written on a thirty-foot long scroll—probably the dopest thing about this book. It currently resides in the home of the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, right next to a briefcase full of pills and a voodoo doll of Tom Brady holding an under-inflated football. It epitomizes the “Beat Generation”, a group of post-World War II creative types that focused on alternative, counter-culture lifestyles, often invoking elements considered conventionally obscene. “Beat” connotes the state of being weary/worn down as well as a musical beat (specifically jazz in this novel). So, why are these guys so tired? Should they perhaps take a nap? In reality, it runs slightly deeper than something a 40 minute snooze can fix (you’re ridiculous if you’re capable of limiting yourself to 20-minutes). These men (and women) were jaded from war and discontented with the predictability of their dreary day-to-day duties. By confronting such an endemic problem that plagued an entire generation, the novel seems to be historic and is hailed as such; however, there are many novels that employ these themes/address these issues, and I feel that this particular one receives undue respect. Why? I’ll tell you!

• It’s about a 25-year-old man who lives off the land and proclaims the mantra, “there was nowhere to go but everywhere” (Kerouac, 26). Certainly a fun topic in theory, but a lot of it is really kind of boring. Oh, he hitchhikes here and doesn’t have any money? Oh, he hitchhikes there and still doesn’t have any money? Look, a pretty squirrel! In my opinion, it was twice as long as it needed to be. Homeboy travels out west, does a bunch of drugs, has a lot of sex, and drinks a ton of booze. He goes back to New York for a hot second until he returns to the west and does it all again. I really thought I had misplaced my (bombass, homemade) bookmark and was accidentally re-reading the same passage. As a whole, it gives you the initial rush of impulsive behavior but once that rush dies out, it’s left seeming long-winded.
• And that is partially because it reads like ramblings. It’s written as a continuous, improvisational letter. This style is experimental, and I can respect that; however, the instability of the characters and the frenetic nature of their conversations often render the text incoherent. In reference to a short-lived love interest, Sal Paradise admits, “Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop” (Kerouac, 126). Well, I understand you about as much as Lucille does. Similarly, Dean frequently gets really geeked up about a far-fetched plan or an idea and then engages in a lengthy passionate tirade that sounds like nonsense. Sure, he’s an engaging character, but his high-intensity can be overwhelming at times.
• So we’ve got a lot of writing, mostly jumbled…but does the novel effectively communicate something of value (or really anything, even if not of value) at all? Short answer: nope. It lacks substance. The novel exalts a lifestyle of impunity and indulgence as a means to fully experience life. Sal Paradise exudes a spirit of awe and appreciation of what America and the world have to offer, which is a beautiful and admirable way of approaching existence. This is precisely what I loved about Into the Wild, both the book and the film. Alexander Supertramp’s explorations were imbued with soul-searching philosophies and he reached a meaningful conclusion at the end of his voyage, even if it was sorrowful. On the Road made similar attempts but in a less articulate, much more licentious manner. They are “mad drunken Americans in the mighty land” who half-heartedly chase after “IT” (Kerouac, 55). And I’m not talking about this guy...
  
  They rightfully recognize that there is more to this world than the traditional schedule of a standard-mold workingman; but they more so just screw around all the time and then pretend it’s part of a wider, cosmic significance. Don’t get me wrong, I like to get my young-wild-and-free on, but I’m also not delusional enough to think that it’s the answer to all of earth’s problems. At least when Paul Kemp (Hunter S. Thompson) drinks himself to oblivion in The Rum Diary, he recognizes the inherent fruitlessness of his debauchery. It was as if Kerouac wanted to try and talk about IT (a truth larger than the self, a less ephemeral consciousness) but instead just partied with no self-awareness. Call hedonism what it is.
• Lastly, the novel, unfortunately, conflates moral accountability with everyday duties. Kerouac thinks that Dean is the absolute shit. He gives the character an undeserved saintly dimension and worships his nonchalance. The problem is that Kerouac misconstrues the benefits of a responsibility-free life, to the detriment of several people. That’s right, I’m calling out an author who has his name on countless “100-books-to-read-before-you-croak” lists. Living responsibility-free (no job, no permanent home, no one to answer to) does not negate all of your moral responsibilities. Quitting my job is one thing, punching my boss just because I feel like it is another. There are other people in Sal and Dean’s life whose lives matter too, and they shouldn’t be sloughed aside just because the men want to live brazenly. That’s some adolescent bullshit.  When describing Dean, the “Holy Goof”, Kerouac says, “bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being” (Kerouac, 194). He’s explicitly saying that Dean foregoes a sense of morality in order to feel awesome and do whatever the hell he wants. Now, maybe this is some sort of commentary on the deconstruction of human-imposed morals, but that seems a little too Kantian for Kerouac’s capabilities (let’s gooooo). To reiterate, I’m not saying that their road-filled escapades are not freeing and rewarding. But try and avoid this: “with one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever” (Kerouac, 248).  It’s all fun and games until you knock up a bunch of women all over the country and leave them to fend for themselves once you get bored. Literally getting turnt up about this.

Now that we have established that the novel is overly hyped and unduly praised, I have a confession to make. Honestly, I enjoyed the book significantly more retrospectively than when I was actively reading it. I finished this novel this past November and recently revisited it for a book discussion that my friend Aline and I have from time to time. When I reopened it, it took on a romanticized quality. Kerouac’s travels took place so long ago, when he could get away with saying, “I had three hundred and sixty-five miles yet to hitchhike to New York, and a dime in my pocket” without having to seriously worry about getting his head cut off by a serial killer (Kerouac, 104). These elusive concepts (inexpensive, easily accessible divorce just because you woke up and felt like it—no binding alimony or child support, paying for a three-cent meal, etc.) are alluring to us. The impossibility of it all seems almost utopic. This kind of gallivanting around could never happen now to that extreme and frankly, that makes me a little jealous. Furthermore, taken piece-meal, there are plenty of solid lines. Again, it’s mostly ramblings, but I was able to underline some real gems. One of my personal favorites, and the inspiration behind many successful diets, I hope: “I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course” (Kerouac, 14). I would be okay with exclusively eating rotisserie chicken and nerds.

In truth, unlike many reviewers who accept the novel’s shallowness as an answer to the implicit promise of a great discovery on the open road, I expected more. It did not change my life; I’m glad that I read it insofar as now I can make fun of it from an informed perspective. Its scattered stylistically impressive sentences are enjoyable, but not enough to compensate for the poorly attempted profundity. I think that I would probably love Kerouac’s poetry—his yearning for truth, love, and life would likely read more digestibly in a condensed form. But this is a review of his novel, and I give it a resounding 2 out of 5 camel humps. If you want a more effective and satisfying means of escaping mundanity and feeling a touch of freedom, I recommend jamming out to “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso -- click to have a really good time. And just FYI, they are playing at Bonnaroo this year, so I’ll use this as a shameless plug to encourage people to join me at Roo so that we meet our group camping quota (I gotchu, Ryan Howick).

*Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: the Penguin Group, 1957. Print.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

            So, I’m attempting to read more novels that have won Pulitzer Prizes because I like nice things. When it comes to these award-winning novels, I enjoy reading about people that are nothing like me, embedded in a setting that I do not directly experience. I get my character-relatability fix from Girls with the whole quirky-white-girl-in-an-elusive-quest-to-leave-her-imprint-on-the-world thing. This particular book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, recounts the life of (fictional character) Oscar De León within the context of his allegedly doomed family. He is an overweight Dominican with a die-hard proclivity for cultish science fiction and a self-destructive weakness for women. Yeah, I’d say we’ve got some dissimilarities to work with.

Oscar’s name is badass; alas, he is not…at least by conventional standards. His luck with the ladies is nonexistent, a stark deviation from the suave Dominican style exuding from his peers. He is trapped in a constant state of “in crush”, an unrequited infatuation with the opposite sex. At times, he accepts his unlayable fate and retreats into his own nerdy heaven. Occasionally, his failed lady-seeking endeavors derail his forced optimism, resulting in intense depressive episodes. The novel is rife with foreshadows of Oscar’s impending ruination. It is also less poetically put: shit is going to go down with Oscar and it is not going to end well.

With his name in the title and all, I figured the book would be pretty much exclusively focused on Oscar. Instead, Junot Díaz gives us a generous taste of the lives of his family members as well. We learn about his older sister, Lola De León, and her difficulties finding her place in the world under the thumb of her abusive mother, Belicia. Once this perspective has been painted, we explore Beli’s own tumultuous past marked by orphanage, rebellion, and her fair share of violence. Her restless, “inextinguishable longing for elsewheres” contributed to the Dominican Diaspora, as she relocated to America following a particularly horrific incident in her homeland (Díaz, 77).

Díaz’s choice of narrative style is particularly inventive. The omniscient narrator is not even introduced as a character until 167 pages in, where you discover he is a huge douche, albeit an entertaining one. For instance, he says things like, “I had my job and the gym and my boys and my novia and of course I had my slutties” which reminds me of Don Jon a little too much (Díaz, 172). Additionally, Díaz capitalizes on ample footnote space. He pulls a Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex move (conveniently also a Pulitzer Prize winner) by planting fictional characters within a historically factual framework. As such, readers learn a great deal about Dominican culture and background. The narrator describes a relevant event or person, and elaborates at the bottom of the page. But this is not your typical informative footnote—it’s knowledge couched in casual language. One footnote enlightens us-- “Balaguer is essential to the Dominican [tale], so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face” (Díaz, 90). Balaguer, kind of an ass, duly noted.

Most of the Dominican history lesson stems from the novel’s preoccupation with ~*fukú*~ (dun dun dun). Fukú refers to the “curse and the doom of the New World” and it is no joke (Díaz, 1). Oscar distinctively feels the reverberations of the spell, evident in his role as the outcast, and it is only until he learns to say f*** you to the fukú that he can be released from its wrenching grasp. The curse has roots in the era of Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo, “The Dictatingist Dictator who ever Dictated” (Díaz, 80). If the narrator’s detailed account is to be believed, this guy belonged to an unfathomable league that stretches the bounds of humanity’s conception of evil. The novel has enough Lord of the Rings references to satisfy every Middle-Earth devotee in the world, most often comparing Trujillo to Sauron (Díaz, 224).

LOTR and related spells aside, Díaz does more than just blend fiction and nonfiction. He also mixes Spanish and English. His use of Spanish language is fairly extensive—more than I was prepared for. I fully recognize that this is cool and imaginative BUT admittedly, it was sometimes inconvenient. I’m not particularly keen on disrupting the narrative flow by consulting my Spanish dictionary every thirty seconds. Obviously, this would not be a problem for a multilingual reader, or a reader with slightly more patience. 

Keeping in mind the Spanglish as a complicated source of both frustration and intrigue, I give the novel 3 out of 5 camel humps. It was pleasurable and humorous to read at the time but I would not re-read it nor would I jump at recommending it. Game of Thrones is the extent of my sci-fi interest because dragons are tight and I appreciate the ruthless drama of not being afraid to kill off main characters (RIP like pretty much everyone); therefore, if you are more partial to this genre, this novel is better suited for you. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by Oscar’s transformation from seemingly intransigent geek into a truly dynamic character, and I took pride in watching his personal growth. Last week, I saw this quote displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in D.C.:

“Art ain’t about paint. It ain’t about canvas. It’s about ideas. Too many people died without ever getting their mind out to the world.”

-Thornton Dial, Sr. 1993

Oscar’s ideas are unfairly stifled for so long because people cannot look past his eccentric character or Yoda voice. When he is finally free to express his feelings of love, he is able to get his mind out to the world, and that is a wonderful thing for the reader to witness. Of course, this takes a while to develop, but... "patience you must have my young padawan" (Star Wars: Episode III-Revenge of the Sith*).

* Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.

*Star Wars: Episode III-Revenge of the Sith. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 2005. Film.

The Things They Carried

             “The Things They Carried”* is a compilation of short stories written by Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran. It begins by literally itemizing what the soldiers in his platoon carried, along with the weight of those objects. O’Brien also includes more abstract, unweighable yet burdensome concepts like fear, awe, power, and memory. 

           

When I bought this novel, I knew I was getting a war book. I figured it would involve guns, camouflage, and stressed-out men occasionally running around and yelling code words. Sure, it’s a story involving war…but more importantly, it’s a book about being a human. When O’Brien was drafted, he felt his conscription was complete and utter bullshit. At the time, he was student body president of Macalester College with an acceptance letter to graduate school at Harvard in his possession. And while he dreaded the idea of being forced to participate in any war, he saw America’s involvement in Vietnam particularly unsettling. There was an ambiguity to the combat abroad, and in his view, “You don’t make war without knowing why” (O’Brien, 38). As a result, he makes a compelling argument that succumbing to the draft was actually an act of cowardice. Men thought that triumphantly blazing into battle was emblematic of their bravery. According to O’Brien, in reality, “Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to…they died so as not to die of embarrassment” (O’Brien, 20). It would damage their pride and bring their family shame to attempt and avoid the war; so instead, many men marched forward and passively accepted their fate, even if it ended in their death. He brings to light an interesting perspective that boils down to basic psychology: why do people do what they do even if they don’t want to do it?

His psych session continues when he exposes how his unit coped with the more gruesome aspects of their missions. When people died, or if they were stuck in uncomfortable circumstances, there was a gripping need to slough it off with humor to ease the tension. Other times, they braced themselves for dreadful situations with deliberate terminology. “They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up” (O’Brien, 19). O’Brien likened the war to a Ping-Pong ball. There were ways to spin it to make it more bearable—put a twist on the thing to make it dance in your favor (O’Brien, 31). I am exceptionally good at Ping-Pong but I would not last a day in combat. 

An additional surprise embedded in this novel was O’Brien’s lessons on the craft of writing. When he returned to America, writing served as a crucial tool to navigating post-war life. Telling his stories was a cathartic endeavor that enabled him to healthily process all that he had witnessed. Seems perfectly normal—a veteran looking for ways to understand his experiences. But O’Brien—as the brilliant author that he is—approaches these experiences in a much more roundabout way. He holds an interesting conception of “truth” in which he occasionally implants lies within his stories, “making up a few things to get at the real truth” (O’Brien, 81). Sometimes they are little white lies; sometimes they are big, glaring ones. Sometimes he discloses to the reader what is factual and what is not; sometimes he keeps us guessing. This aberrant method is not about deception; rather, it is an effort to more accurately recreate specific sensations.

Novels like Ham on Rye and The Rum Diary tested the boundaries by meshing actual events with fictional elements. This novel takes a step further; some plots and some characters are entirely invented in order to make the reader feel as O’Brien truly felt in battle. Sometimes we need to be lied to in order to empathize. But for him, the end goal is always clarity. He explains, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience…you pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened…and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (O’Brien, 152).

Generally, I do not like to be lied to. If I catch you in a fib, I expect an Edible Arrangement (heavy on the pineapple) and a Starbucks gift card. In this case, I’ll make an exception. O’Brien is a liar because he wants to tell the truth. And that is goddamn beautiful. His creativity alone earns this novel 5 out of 5 camel humps. He also uses the word “humping” as a common war-term for carrying and I find that comical, because apparently, I’m a thirteen-year-old boy. If I had written this novel, it’d be called The Things They Humped and it’d be much less poetic.  

*O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1990. Print.