It might be accurate and fair to say that I am a fan of Jack Kerouac's writing. I'm not entirely certain what the value of it is to say so, though — Except that, given that I am an avid reader of his work, and some of it multiple times (and there are very few writings I read multiple times), then perhaps it says something to note that I've only read his first book (when he was publishing with the name John) The Town and the City, recently.
Why did it take me so long to get around to reading it? I believe it was at some juncture recommended that I not read it, given my affection for his other work - that it so stood apart from that work as to be an unfavourable anomaly. I now challenge this idea.
There are obvious ways in which this could be said to be true, of course, with the main one being the use of the 3rd person narrative voice instead of the 1st person (although Dr Sax doesn't exactly use the 1st or the 3rd, or 2nd - it comes sort of from a position somewhere between the 1st and 3rd). But otherwise, I think there is perhaps not as much similarity within all his books that are post 1st book, and nor is there perhaps so much difference between those works and the 1st book as may be generally supposed.
In fact, I was struck by a consistency between my sense of his books post 1st book and that 1st book. It is as though it didn't really matter what narrative voice he was using (although as a writer, of course, it mattered to him -- and it matters to me also as a writer which case I use, and I recognize that there is a way the writing does get into your mind differently as a reader, depending on the narrative voice case) — the "grain" of his living voice is there regardless. Whatever it is that produces a sense in me of the writer remains consistently there — in some ways nascent, perhaps, but in other ways eternal, fully present, there, despite his formal artistry with regard to the text.
I was struck by the remarkable beauty of the writing, of the insight and feeling in it (particularly of a sort of meditation on sadness, the sadness of being, the lovely sadness and the ineluctable sadness, the terrible sadness that pushes one towards inarticulate conclusions about being in the world — but also of the writing's vibrancy, of its love for life expressing itself unselfconsciously and as part of some bigger ineffable yet unmistable something), which pervades all of his work in my mind.
I was intrigued by depictions of New York in the 1940s, of music, of film, of literature, of social life, of a new kind of woman speaking in a new peculiar way in literature, with a new kind of mobility, of the sense of changes coming about as a result of the 2nd World War, of rural life in Massachusetts, of the cultural landscape that he was so great at sketching. I was also entertained by the early renderings of a cast of characters that were such a deep essential part of his life. And finally, I was taken by of a sense of his family life that I never really had before. I was fascinated, moved and entertained by this work. Some of the sentences blew my mind. Their rhythm and lyrical quality at times sublime.
In a way, I'm glad it took me so long to get around to it. It was like finding a long lost work by an artist, without suffering the disappointment that sometimes comes from reading, viewing or listening to it. It is or was an annexed work (I think the only one not available digitally, but I could be wrong about that, and if that means anything), but it is well integrated now for me.
