The End Of The Road

I still remember the first time I read Jack Kerouac's classic novel “On the Road.” I was a young man at the time. I drank a lot. I smoked a lot. I read a lot. I basically thought I was pretty smart (“thought” being the operative word here).

To say “On the Road” was up my alley would be a true understatement. The fact based tale of two friends racing back and forth across North America while soaking up booze, drugs and illicit sex can be enormously appealing to impressionable twenty-somethings and I was no exception. I not only found the lifestyle Kerouac championed in “On the Road” fascinating. I found it something to aspire to.

Fortunately, a few rough years and some hard earned life lessons brought me around to seeing things more clearly. I would always love Kerouac as a writer, but would also realize that, as a responsible adult, the man was a dismal failure - a lousy parent and full blown alcoholic who finally drank himself to death at the way too young age of forty-seven.

That's the dangerous thing about Kerouac. He's such an appealing writer that his tales of decadent transience can seem far more glamorous and exciting than the conventional lives we lead and see around us every day.

Which is why I find his later novel, “Big Sur,” so fascinating. “Big Sur” is like “On the Road” in that it is autobiographical. Unlike “On the Road,” however, this more mature work deals with the consequences of Kerouac's self-destructive lifestyle.

Here the author is no longer the timeless hipster. Rather, he is an exhausted, broken man who, closing in on forty, needs to escape the clutches of the debilitating existence he once embraced so gleefully.

Sequestering himself in a cabin in California's rustic Big Sur, Kerouac does indeed start to regain his physical and emotional strength. Time, boredom and the siren song of bohemain life, however, eventually prove too strong to resist.

The end of the novel is both frightening and tragic. Bringing friends and a newfound girlfriend from San Franciso to the cabin in Big Sur for a good time, Kerouac (called Jack Duluoz in the novel) proceeds to have an alcohol induced mental breakdown in front of all present. Rather than being a place of rejuvination, the cabin has proven to be a place of emotional and spiritual collapse.

Fans of “On the Road,” particularly young fans, would do well to give “Big Sur” a read. Like all Kerouac novels, it contains great writing (not good writing, great writing). It also serves as a counterpoint, not only to “On the Road,” but to the entire Kerouac mystique in general; for “Big Sur” shows us where Kerouac's road eventually took him.

It's a place no one would wish to go.