currently reading: on the road
Shamefully, I have never read this before.
Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era. The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted at in the Great Gatsby followed through to its logical conclusion where cars, sex, alcohol, divorce, travel and the wild, strange sound of jazz are unexpectedly available – and the purposeless drifting and nihlism of living without any great force of history or pre-determined role or destiny to drive one along. The 1960s were about to shake American society to its core, and the real life characters portrayed by Kerouac hum with the barely contained energy of the coming explosion.
In San Francisco we stopped in at Vesuvio for a beer – a bar visited by Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac:
This is the next book on my pile of books to read. I’m about half-way through Kingdom of Fear, then it’s On The Road and following that it’s going to be an unauthorised biography of Tom Waits. Which should be interesting.
It’s definitely an interesting read. I guess when you imagine the stuff portrayed in the book in the context of the era of history it’s pretty provocative, even if it would only raise eyebrows slightly now for the most part. I don’t think I’ve read Kingdom of Fear, although I probably read bits of it in The Great Shark Hunt which is a sort of best-of Hunter anthology. I want to steal that Waits biography from you when you’re done…
If you finish On The Road soon, you’re more than welcome to grab the Waits bio. I can always read something else first.