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Dan Green has an interesting re-appraisal of On the Road
In short, On the Road seemed rather tame to me, its rebellion more ingenuously earnest than hard-edged, and I read no further Kerouac for many years. Not too long ago, I decided to try reading On the Road again, expecting that I would quickly enough find it the same tepid experience as the first time around, that I would in fact probably stop reading it fairly early on and consign Kerouac permanently to the category of literary disappointments. However, although I can’t say I immediately became entranced by it, I did not stop reading it. I did almost immediately judge the novel’s protagonist, Sal Paradise, to be a more interesting character than I had previously, when he seemed to be mostly a cipher. Now I saw his restlessness as a genuine craving for experience, not affectation or pretense. At the same time, I found Dean Moriarty a less annoying character than I had the first time around, although I still wouldn’t identify his appearances in the novel as necessarily among its highlights. I suspect that the reputation as an “outlaw” text to which I responded impatiently in my initial reading of On the Road, originates in an over-identification with Moriarty, who some readers took to be the novel’s most important character. I think Sal Paradise is obviously the main character, and while Moriarty has his role to play in the intensification of Sal Paradise’s immersion in experience, he does still too often come off as affected and pretentious, and future critics and scholars would do the novel a service by focusing more on the way his character reinforces the novel’s formal and stylistic ambitions and less on his dubious deeds and spurious words of wisdom.
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“Now I saw his restlessness as a genuine craving for experience, not affectation or pretense.”
I agree, but how in the world is this a reappraisal? I’ve never talked to anyone who believed Sal (or Neal Cassady) was inauthentic.
I guess it’s a reappraisal of his own opinion. And I do hear this book mentioned perhaps more than any other as unworthy of its fame (I disagree.) I think this post dovetails nicely with your previous post about second readings, Scott. Any book that has a hyped reputation is at risk of not meeting up to misguided expectations. Literary critics are at a disadvantage compared to film or food critics because they don’t often have time to re-read before critiquing.
I only read On The Road once, as a teenager, but I remember it specifically encouraging me to reappraise my opinion of jazz (which by that time had morphed from high-energy, rebellious youth music into something very staid and proper for the older generation.)