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