Customer Reviews

Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form

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That Michael Hrebeniak knows his material is undeniable. That he is also part of the forces of academia and publicity that he explains plagued Jack Kerouac is also undeniable. That he is unaware of this irony is likely also undeniable, given that he never mentions it. This irony runs through Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form, as Hrebeniak talks about how beats, like Kerouac, disliked the way academia and popular culture seized their works, and those of their predecessors. Works that once fought against society become common topics in the dominant culture, and the subject of academic works like this book.

In a way, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form is not original as a book, being like any academic paper, made of a whole string of closely packed quotes from previous efforts of others and the novels it discusses. That it reveals the interrelated nature of those works, as influences of Kerouac's style is Hrebeniak's true purpose. However, he spends little time explaining these references, meaning that readers will need background in various areas, such as the books and philosophers mentioned within. I will personally point out that the fellaheen mentioned frequently are simply the Egyptian peasant class. What exactly the beats also meant in mentioning them is not directly stated, any more than the word origin I mentioned.

This book would be best used in a classroom setting, where the general subject area can be covered, in terms of beat writings and American history. It is not meant to teach the reader how to emulate Kerouac's style of action writing, meaning only to contextualize it, and compare it to its times and peers. What Hrebeniak does is find Kerouac's place in the long line of literature and philosophical tradition, as well as history, with references to his ideological borrowing from such diverse sources as the obvious jazz and Buddhism, but also Wolfe, James Joyce, Rousseau, Nietze, as well as Aristotle and many others. So many come up, that the book almost becomes a word salad, jumbled with names, theories, styles, Freud, space-time, cinematography, elegant overarching themes, masculinity, all percolated, Hrebeniak claims, through the mind of Kerouac, as he contemplated Neal Cassidy while on marijuana.

Generally, the main problem I would cite with this book is that it is rather a bit too dense for casual reading. It is very much an academic book, both in terms of literary criticism, and a historical account of Kerouac and his writing environment. This is problematic, of course, in that the author who is the topic, Kerouac, found this kind of analysis dreary, according to Hrebeniak, even. On the plus side, Hrebeniak does well in not completely shying away from problematic features of Kerouac's works, spending some time on the implications of his opinions and depictions of women and various sexual topics and actions. I recommend it, again, for classes on modern American literature, beats, hippies, postwar American suburbia or the cold war.