On On the Road

You know what Jack Kerouac is not very good at describing?

Travel.

I've been reading On the Road, that Great American Classic of the Beat Generation, for the last few days. It turns out this book has a problem. You expect that a novel should move, because if nothing happens then... well, nothing happens. But what I've learned from On the Road is that constant movement does not make a good narrative. Here, take a look at this passage from page 15:

I went right on into Des Moines, about four miles, hitching a ride with two boys from the University of Iowa; and it was strange sitting in their brand-new comfortable car and hearing them talk to exams as we zoomed smoothly into town. Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks -- and there's a lot of them in Des Moines -- and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved into the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards.

Do you see the problem? He's giving us all this detail, which might in principle be interesting, but we don't care. We don't have a reason to care. The characters are disposable. The setting is disposable (Des Moines appears on page 15 and is gone by page 16). There is no plot or theme to speak of. We don't have any reason yet to care about the narrator, Sal (remember, this is page 15). So Kerouac has spent over a hundred words explicating detail that will be irrelevant in another hundred words.

But it's not all bad news. There are parts of On the Road where you sit up and start paying attention. The weird thing is that it doesn't happen on the road. It happens when Sal starts getting attached to something -- some person or place -- and stops moving for a few pages. You actually begin to understand who he is, the tension in him between the needs for responsibility and for freedom, for friends and for individuality. He's less well articulated than Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, maybe, but he's broadly similar and interesting. But then we pitch back into motion and Sal resumes describing how he gets from one place to another. That part is boring. And as for Dean, who most readers seem to regard as the piece's main character, his mind never comes to rest long enough to understand what he's all about. In fact, that is what he's all about. That's the point. And as a result there's nothing there to relate to, at least for this reader.

Lessons for Lover's Lanes? No one cares what interstates I took or what I saw out the car windows or what hotel I stayed at. Maybe they're worth mentioning occasionally -- I don't want you to lose the road noise in your ears as you read -- but as a rule if I'm not going to spend at least one full page exploring a person or place, it's probably not worth mentioning. Italo Calvino knew that when he wrote Invisible Cities, and now I know it too. And the narrative voice, the part of the book where you get to know the traveler and not just the travels, is crucial. Calvino knew that too. Kerouac perhaps not so much.