Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
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Book Reviews of Desolation Angels
Book Review: gotta love the guy...
Summary: 3 Stars
I have been reading Kerouac for about twenty years (but still haven't exhausted the canon). After reading Desolation Angels I think it might still be a while.You have got to love Kerouac to get through much of this book (and I do) and it is ultimately worth the effort, but what an effort! Too much of this book is "we did this, then we did that" and Kerouac's lack of contextualizing all this can get to you.
But there are always small epiphanies that make Kerouac worth reading. There are about six in this book, the best being his brief account of his sea voyage to Tangiers on a Yugoslav freighter in a storm. "It scares a seaman to hear the Kitchen scream in fear." And Kerouac's lamentation on the unfortunate popularization of the 'cool' ethos: "But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair listening to their awful 'likes' and 'like you know' and 'wow crazy'...All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing!"
Much of what makes Kerouac one of the American Big Three is that nobody else could get away with writing like this. It ain't pretty and it's often exasperating, but what a Great Soul.
Book Review: A Trifle Over-Rated
Summary: 3 Stars
For some readers who found this book after reading some of Kerouac's more conventional literary works, this novel may come off as a bit tedious. Kerouac wasn't that great an experimental novelist, or at least not as graceful with spontaneous prose and extra-sensory perceptive description as his pier William S. Burroughs, as exemplified by the book's more incoherent and often undermanaged meanderings. As a piece of creative autobiography, however, the novel is a symbolic giant of originality, fearlessly defying traditional literary convention and organization. For those seeking out Kerouac for more traditional entertainment, however, the novel proves far more complex than a single reading may warrant.