Customer Reviews

Dr. Sax.

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This is kerouac's favourite out of all of his works - and rightly so. It delves into his psyche and provides an almost burroughsesque peice of literature. This book is not for people unused to the writing of kerouac, so if you haven't read any before i recommend that you check out On The Road before embracing this. It begins as a regular peice of kerouac, recounting events of his very early youth in Lowell, Mass. but ascends (or decends depending on your opinion) into a realm of psychedelic, almost biblical dream-hallucination based on a mythical character called Dr. Sax who combats the realms of evil (with the help of young JK/JD) which are personified by the snake, but more supremely by the dove. I wont tell the end 'cause that would piss ev'ryone off but shall finish by saying that Dr. Sax comes highly recommended by me as an 'alternative' kerouac.

While Kerouac is most known for his popular Beat works such as On the Road, Dharma Bums and Subterraneans, I think the true depth of his creative genius can be found in this phantastic exploration of the rich world of childhood fantasy. The book is not a necessarily easy read. It is filled with the alliterative nonsensical wordplay that Kerouac seemed to delight in. The narrative does not flow in a linear motion. It reads more like the distracted musings of a young boy. The writing is smooth, however, and flows with the jazz-infused seamlessness that Kerouac is known for.

There are several layers to the story. The first is the recounting of Kerouac's childhood in Lowell, Mass. His imagery is bold and imbued with power. Descriptions of the town and his experiences there easily pull the reader in. You can hear the cold rush of the river. You can see the streets, the crooked trees, the gray smoke. You can feel the snowy shadowy dread of winter. You can even feel the childhood excitement of made up games and secret worlds.

The second layer of this story is Kerouac's wildly rich imaganitive world, which plays out in unison with his daily romps with neighborhood friends and family. Here is where the story is truly remarkable. Dr. Sax is a figure of Jack's imagination. He is personal and archetypal, a complex of adolescence and creeping maturity. At once sinister and intriguing, Dr. Sax leaps through the pages like a summoner. You want to rush after him. But childhood distracts and the mundane world draws back both your and Kerouac's attention time and time again. What Kerouac has done is brilliantly bring to life the secret fantasy world of the child. And he has done so without the slightest kitsch or fuzziness. The book is soaked in sentimentality, but it is darkly sentimental, almost mournful. I finished the book with a bit of sadness - sorry the book had ended and also missing my own youthful past.

This is a childhood book for adults. The third layer of the story is Dr. Sax himself. Beyond Jack and his fantasy world, there is Dr. Sax and his own machinations. Like a true archetypal figure from Jack's unconscious, Dr. Sax is working behind the scenes, mysterious, frightenting, mad and misunderstood. He is preparing, ostensibly for Jack's maturation, certainly for dark battles. Dr. Sax could be Kerouac's creative madness, possibly his shadow. In any case, he is a constant flirter of shadows, coloring the gray world of Lowell with something like a deep ocher.

This is Jack Kerouac at his poetic best, in my opinion. At his sentimental best. At his mournful Catholic best. At his imaginative best. Though it is fiction, it is also a great insight into the poetic realm of Kerouac's mind. If this was not his childhood as it truly was, then it was his childhood as he dreamed it to be, which is just as telling. I suspect it is a delicate mixture of both. Fiction or no, the book rings of truth. Dr. Sax resonates deep inside of the reader, tocuhing primal nerves and stirring the many ghosts that roam our collective imaginative pasts.

I highly recommend it.

Another great novel by the master of Beat. In this book Kerouac takes us thru the town of Lowell, centering around Christ-like pneuma Sax as his tutelary spirit. Many biblical symbols often appear, somehow transforming the novel to holy scriptures. When reading Dr. Sax I discover that writing can be comical and at the same time perceptive. A must read.

This book is a creeper. A few months after you read it, you will realize that you love it. Kerouak mentions the conceptualization of Dr. Sax in On the Road, where JK's main character talks about a book he is writing, and mentions the ultimate scene in Sax. The story is full of visuals that stay in the mind. Inspiration from Bram Stoker is evident, and mixes with old radio serials adventure. A coming of age story that is comic book, before comic books were cool, and with a fantastic ending that is unexpected and thought provoking. A wonderful read every time.

There has always been much of the child in Kerouac. Whether creating a baseball game from a deck of cards in Desolation Angels, or just displaying a child-like fascination and exuberance at the prospect for a hiking trip in the Dharma Bums, he comes across as a naive man-child, the reluctant herald of a new social and literary order. After publication of On the Road, he became fascinated with the idea of a Balzacian type of literary work that would encompass the life of the writer, but would be autobiographical only in a peripheral way. It would be a sprawling collection of novels, vignettes and poems with a re-occurring cast of characters that would allow the reader to view the author in a series of vaguely related situations. This grand epic was to be know as the Duluoz Legend. True, his first novel, The Town and the City, dealt with much of the same material contained in Dr. Sax, but that book was written before Kerouac found his true voice, the one that was displayed in On the Road. So, armed with a new style he was to revisit his youth once more and add to the legend.

What makes this novel distinct from The Town and the City, other than its style, is Kerouac's emphasis on the fantasy world of his youthful protagonist. Ti Jean does what most other adolescent boys do: play sports, hang out with his friends, discover masturbation, and lose himself in the fantasy world of comics, radio and movies. Chief among these are the Street and Smith westerns and the mysterious hero of the weekly radio program, The Shadow - "who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men." Ti Jean, has his own phantom fighter of evil: Dr. Sax, who hangs out down by the banks of the Merrimack, has a greenish complextion, wears a slouch hat in which he stores his secret weapons and potions, and is seen "flowing in the back darks with his wild and hincty cape." Unbeknown to Ti Jean's family and friends trouble has come to Lowell, Mass. In the abondoned mansion on top of Snake Hill the apocalyptic battle between good and evil is to be fought between Dr. Sax and the satanic Serpent, slowly worming its way up from Hell. Although Lowell is saved from the destructive forces of the Serpent, Dr. Sax plays little part in this salvation - he is exposed as quite the inept evil fighter - but by a giant bird that picks up the Serpent and carries it away. All that the ineffectual Dr. Sax can say is, "I'll be damned ... The Universe disposes of its own evil."

I know that I am comparing kumquats to oranges here, but in this novel Kerouac did for Lowell what Joyce did for Dublin. With almost almanac-like precision he describes that mill city of the mid and late 1930s (even providing a sketch map of his Pawtucketville neighborhood) so that armed with a copy of the novel, the present-day reader can follow in Kerouac's footsteps. The Lowell that is described in the novel is essentially an immigrant community, one principally occupied by French Canadians who came south to work in the mills. This community is described with love and attention to detail and Kerouac captures the rhythm of the speech and the social interactions so important to that community. Another high point of the novel is the vivid description of the great flood of 1936, when much of the city was unundated, forcing hundreds to flee their homes.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's (1922-- 1969) "On the Road." The Library of America, among others publishers, has marked the occasion with the publication of a new volume including five Kerouac "Road Novels". I wanted to reread other works by Kerouac besides the "road novels" that are in danger of being overlooked, and I turned to "Dr. Sax". Kerouac wrote "Dr. Sax" in 1952 while living with William Burroughs in Mexico City. It was a difficult time for both writers. Kerouac had already written "On the Road" but could not get it published. Burroughs had just accidentally killed his lover, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of "William Tell". "Dr. Sax" proved even more difficult to publish than "On the Road" and did not appear in print until 1959.

"Dr. Sax" differs from "On the Road" and the other books in the LOA collection in that it is set in Lowell, Massachusetts, the town where Kerouac grew up. Lowell is a small mill town on the banks of the Merrimack River. During Kerouac's boyhood, it was home to a substantial French-Canadian immigrant population, to a community of Greek Americans and to several other diverse ethnic groups. Kerouac's parents were both immigrants from French Canada. They spoke a dialect of French in their home and Kerouac did not learn English until he was about seven years old. A fascinating part of "Dr. Sax" is the French dialogue among Kerouac and his family -- with Kerouac immediately providing an English rendition in addition to the French.

The book is written from the perspective of an adult -- Kerouac in 1952 in Mexico City -- looking back and reflecting upon his childhood and early adolescence from the standpoint of his ongoing difficult life as a writer struggling for publication and combating his own inner demons of drugs and alcohol. It opens with a dream, and Kerouac tells the reader that "memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe." The book features a strange character the young Kerouac invented named Dr. Sax, a sinister figure in a cape and slouch hat. Dr. Sax is accompanied by other bizzare characters including Count Cordu the Vampire, the Great Snake, the Wizard, and others who live in a large weed-grown abandoned house on a snake-infested hill just outside of Lowell. Kerouac conceived the idea of Dr. Sax from various comic books that were popular when he was a child.

"Dr. Sax" is memorable largely for the picture it draws of Kerouac's childhood and of Lowell. (Kerouac is named Jack Duluoz or "Ti Jean" in the book.) It gives good portraits of Kerouac's mother and father and of the family's many moves among the poorer neighborhoods of the town and of Kerouac's older sister and ill-fated brother Gerard who died when he was ten. Kerouac, Ti Jean is portrayed as a sensitive, imaginative and athletic child. The book offers portraints of Kerouac playing baseball and marbles, going to church, engaging in pranks and fights with his childhood friends and enemies, watching movies and reading books, experiencing the first flush of sexuality and learning to masturbate, and learning of death, in the person of Gerard and several others. The book also shows a great deal of Lowell and its environs, especially of a large flood that destroyed much of the city's downtown in 1936.

The story of young Ti Jean and of Lowell is punctuated by comic-book like tales of Dr. Sax. Dr. Sax also appears as a shadowy figure commenting upon and observing the life of young Kerouac and his family and friends. There is something sinister about Sax throughout most of the book. He is partly drawn from William Burroughs, as he is shown travelling through South and Central America for various "powders". In the lengthy final chapter of the book, Ti Jean accompanies Dr. Sax in a bizzare chapter in which Sax purports to ward off the forces of evil that threaten Lowell. The story gets a sharp wizard-of-Oz-like twist at the end.

With the comic characters and the surprise ending, there is a great deal of mad humor in Dr. Sax, but the tone still is predominantly one of melancholy and reflection. In one particularly good scene, Kerouac's dying uncle prophetically tells him: "my child poor Ti Jean, do you know my dear that you are destined to be a man of big sadness and talent-- it'll never to live or die, you'll suffer like others -- more" The Dr. Sax figure, similarly, seems to show the price Kerouac paid for becoming a writer. The book suggests -- with its subtitle "Faust Part Three" that Kerouac's writing was part of a Faustian bargain with Dr. Sax in which Kerouac paid for his literary imagination with a sad and tormented life.

Dr. Sax was Kerouac's favorite among his own novels, and many readers would among his work regard it as his best or second-best after "On the Road." (Other works have their own partisans as well.) This book will interest readers who want to see a lesser-known side of Kerouac. The book is written in a variety of styles. It is erratic and not easy reading. Those who are interested in Kerouac's portrayals of his life in Lowell might also enjoy "Maggie Cassidy" and Kerouac's first and underappreciated book, "The Town and the City".

Robin Friedman

Jacks Dr Sax represents his thoughts,feelings and fantasies throughout his early years in Lowell. Masterfully told through pre-birth, present tense and future tense, Dr Sax weaves a tangled web of delight to those who take the plunge into the River called Kerouac. The chapter "The Night The Man With The Watermelon Died" is worth the price of admission alone. Thank God for Kerouac a good companion throughout lifes troubled waters.

This book is Keroauc sitting in on a mean late night
jazz jam session, writing and reciting verse while all
those around him are blowing madly. It is very
different from the mainstream Keroauc where he
talks about writing in this style. This book is the
style as it spins a story in and out of the rhealm of
the waking consciousness and reminds me of the way I
feel like after listening to some classic Miles.
Read this book and let in linger in your mind for a
while, it has that kind of depth to it.

This book is powerful and honest. Coming out in the same year as Burroughs' Naked Lunch the two works bear many striking similaruites. Compared to the other works by Kerouac I've read (On the Road, The Dharma Bums and parts of Maggie Cassidy, Subteranean angels) this book seems strikingly different. The work that Jack and Ginsberg did on the Heroin infested Burroughs' scriblings to come up with the powerhouse work, Naked Lunch, must have had a tremendous effect on Jack. This work shares the disragard for the line between fantasy and reality, a compelte self indulgeance of the writer (I can see Jack with his reams of paper, just clacking away, howling with leerie laughter like the Shadow) and a dedication to storytelling and imagination that Naked Lunch displayed. for a whilrwind read fest, try to digest the two in succession.

Who is Doctor Sax? At first glance, he appears as a shadowy, even frightening figure from pulp comics. He dons a cape and a slouch hat; he changes colors depending on the time of day. Is he a demonic figure, lurking in the darkness intent on catastrophic destruction or is he simply a regular guy in an atypical superhero type costume?

_Doctor Sax_ is basically a series of interconnected tales of the bizarre, as seen primarily through the eyes of its young protagonist, Jean Duluoz. Lowell, Mass. in the 1930s is the backdrop, and the realistic part of the novel includes Jean's interactions with his parents and his boyhood friends. Jean and his buddies engage in all the compulsory games of childhood, including baseball and shooting marbles. The book also contains a large section concerning the flooding of the Merrimac River during a spring thaw. As seen from some of the boys' point of view, the anticipated floods provide sheer excitement, while their adult counterparts react with fear and horror.

The fantasy part of the book, concerning haunted castles, demons, huge coiling snakes and an ultra-colossal sized bird, contains some of the best and most imaginative science fiction/fantasy writing ever. _Doctor Sax_ is not just merely a very superior pulp tale of good vs. evil, it is also a work of genius and wit. Mr. Kerouac, having written in an entirely different genre for him, has clearly outdone himself.