A Delay

Sorry about the break in posts, NaNoWriMo is kicking me in the behind. The good news is that I have ~16,000 words to go and should be done by Thanksgiving. You can look forward to more reviews after Thanksgiving. 

-Mr. Cheddar

The Town and the City

The Town and the City Jack Kerouac 499pp.

Jack Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City is a marvelous entry into Kerouac’s work. It provides a great vehicle for understanding how Kerouac’s novels work both from a critical perspective and from just the point-of-view of just simply reading them. In brief, The Town and the City follows the varied lives of the Martin family in the years leading up to and shortly after World War 2. Every book Kerouac wrote is a fictionalized account of his life, and with the right key, one can translate almost every character in the book into a real person from his life.

The Town and the City has a few problems, mostly in that none of the female characters get a reasonable amount of narrative space. Ruth, Liz, and Rose, as well as a spate of girlfriends pass through the pages, interacting with the Martin sons, and then drifting off into deeper recesses of the narrative. Marguerite Martin gets a slight reprieve from this, Kerouac loved his mother and features her extremely prominently in his novel. Kerouac gives his mother a vastly more central role in the book, as a substantial part of the pair around whom the family revolved, though I must admit that she is still confined almost exclusively to domesticity.

I can, however, set aside these faults in the novel largely on the grounds that, while on the surface it is a rambling book about the entire Martin family’s lives, in reality it is a book about Jack Kerouac’s adolescence reflected through a prism of three men. Joe Martin is the working Kerouac, the traveling, wild image he projects of himself at times as a working-class hero. Francis Martin is, at some level, the Kerouac of soft intellectual ruminations, brooding in the garret. In truth, however, the real stand-in for Kerouac is Peter Martin.

Everything in Peter Martin’s life, from the football, to the Merchant Marine, to the experiences in New York City are directly culled from Kerouac’s own life. I think that this is a really important understanding to go into this book with, understanding that Kerouac was not simply a refined, effete writer standing on his soapbox writing his novels about the world. He was an athlete, however much or little that actually says about his character. He was able to go to Columbia and study how to be a writer because he got a full-ride scholarship to play football. It’s easy to lose sight of this in studying Kerouac’s work, but I think that going into his novels with an early understanding of who the man was in reality is important before studying who he portrayed himself to be in fiction.

In The Town and the City, Kerouac writes with breathtaking grandeur, sweeping across the plains and forests of New England with Russian magnificence. Reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Galsworthy, Kerouac drifts through the the lives of his fictionalized family growing up, growing old, and growing apart in the malaise of the 1940’s.

Would I recommend The Town and the City? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Score: 4.6/5

Would I keep this on my shelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

Deliberate Prose

Deliberate Prose Allen Ginsberg 536pp.

Allen Ginsberg, while most well-known as a poet, was phenomenally talented as an essayist as well. Ginsberg’s poetry, which teemed through every line with its intensely charged political rhetoric is very easily understood in light of these essays. The book can be understood in three sections: first, Ginsberg’s political beliefs, criticism of American military actions, and espousal of the use of marijuana and psychadelics; second, a discussion of his religious beliefs and experiences; and third, the majority of the book, a long series of essays about his friends and other writers he knew or studied.

This last section is by far the most useful collection of writing I have ever read for understanding Allen Ginsberg. Reading his own writing and explanation of other poets helps tremendously to place him in the context of the writers he loved so much. The lengthy explication of Whitman’s poetry provides more than a little bit of understanding into the work of that great master of American poetry. At the same time, however, it gives much more insight into Allen Ginsberg’s own theory of poetry.

Ginsberg was, in no small way, a 20^th century Whitman. His verse evolved as he became more established as a poet, working in the same long-form lines as Whitman. For now small period of time, I thought that this was where the similarity between the two poets was at its strongest. What I have realized, largely through this essay, is that Ginsberg does his most similar work through his choice of focus. Working in the same way as Carl Sandburg, Ginsberg focused on a thousand little images around the country, putting them together with a brutal sense of honesty to form a legendary corpus of poems.

These essays are marvelous. Allen Ginsberg’s writing pops with unexpected images and a constant freshness of language. Never does Ginsberg begin to develop any sense of detachment from his enjoyment of the things he writes about, but rather he enthusiastically discusses the things he loves. This enthusiasm carries over into the reader and creates a greatly enjoyable collection of writing.

Would I recommend Deliberate Prose? Yes.

Score: 4.2/5

Would I keep this on my shelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar