Customer Reviews

The Portable Jack Kerouac (Portable Library)

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This collection is wonderfully edited. There are no major breaks in the plot and Ann Charters commentary provides a good context to understand the book (e.g. she provides a table that matches character names to actual people). However, since the books were written out of order, the immensely different writing styles of Kerouac's different novels do not mesh well at times. It is fine for somebody who has had previous exposure to Kerouac's writing and now wants a survey of all his different styles, but I would generally recommend buying the individual books.

GRANTED that the selections are a mishmash of Kerouac styles, and at times misuse words with a kind of tender haughtiness and screw you if you don't like it but this is what I bruit. Bruit? But at his best Kerouac time and again tells us of that railroad earth and trains rolling under October skies and rushes up our noses with piney phrases that would raise gooseflesh on Thomas Wolfe. What's more, Ann Charters serves Jack nobly by inventively selecting along a timeline that captures the hero's age throughout, a superb bit of editing much like Malcolm Cowley's for The Portable Faulkner in which he patched together a groundbreaking picture of Yoknapatawpha County from Faulkner's many works. A Must-Have Kerouac volume that should break ground for new readers and give old admirers a bath in that old spontaneous prose he dreamed up nightly with candlelight on the kitchen table, booze, and weed. Some of it's mush, some visionary, and much of it just what writing should be: straight from the heart.

This is a great introduction to the range of styles and themes that Kerouac's artistry brings to the page. Ann Charters, who wrote one of the first and best of the long line of Kerouac biographies, shows herself to be a deft editor in this volume. She fits the "essential" chapters of Kerouac's major books together to present a mosaic of his talent and invites us to follow Kerouac from his "Town and City" Thomas Wolfe style through the wild marijuana sense-o-round syntax of "Dr. Sax" and "Mexico City Blues" to the benzedrine jack-hammers in "The Subterraneans," "On the Road" and "Visions of Cody". Along the way we see Kerouac's energy brown and shrivel in "The Dharma Bums"; his sentimentality run amuck in "Tristessa" and "Visions of Gerald." We read cobbled-together explanations of what "Beat" means, and the "first thought/best thought" of spontaneous prose that's become a siren song for so much post-post-post modern blather. "Who touches this book touches the man," Whitman said (or should have said, if he didn't), and the same surely applies to Kerouac, whose writing falters as his body falters and youth, health, mind and being fume away in a great "Bonfire of the Vanities." Charters gives the essentials to us--even down to the English language haiku complete with dead flies in medicine cabinets. Pick this book up first, along with the Charters' biography, then move on to Charters' Portable Beat Anthology, then branch out (if you need to) to the new volumes of Kerouac being "discovered" all the time and keep the dream, the romance of the "open road" going--along with the steady industry that Beat-dom has grown to become in the 21st century. In this chunky volume, Ann Charters presents the very best of Kerouac and does not pretend to redefine his worst writing as somehow his best, as do those with a vested interest in Kerouac the Buddhist Saint. For that, all clear-headed readers must thank her.

This volume contains a list of Jack Kerouac's twenty-four published books extending from The Town and the City (1950)to Old Angel Midnight (1993)and Good Blonde & Others (1993), as well as his other publications and a small sampling of his letters.

An identity key is included to aid readers in relating the names of Kerouac's fictional characters to those of his friends and acquaintances.

His most famous book, On the Road, was viewed by Kerouac as a subset of a larger biographical work titled The Legend of Duluoz, which is the story of his lifetime, in which he is Jack Duluoz.

The editor, Dr. Ann Charters,partioned The Legend of Duluoz chronologically into selections from Dr. Sax, Visions of Gerard, Maggie Cassidy, Vanity of Duluoz, On the Road, The Subterraneans,Tristessa, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur.
There are additional sections titled Poetry, On Spontaneous Prose, The Modern Spontaneous Method, On Bop and the Beat Generation, and On Buddhism.

His earliest book publication, The Town and the City, is seen to be influenced by the writings of Thomas Wolfe, and in later works Kerouac is influenced by music in general and jazz and Bop in particular, as well as by Buddhism.

As the reader navagates this lengthy volume, it will be seen that the variations in Kerouac's many writing styles, some traditional and some experimental, can be disruptive.

Although it is convenient to have a systematic sampling of Jack Kerouac's writing in a well-organized and well-documented fashion, as the editor, Ann Charters, recommends, it is best to read the original works in their entirety.

Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.

"As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg", recently I have been in a "beat" generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac's lesser work under review here, "Big Sur", that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell's `bad boy', the "king of the 1950s beat writers".

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, "On The Road", his classic modern physical and literary `search' for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title "The Legend Of Duluoz". Excerpts, in some cases like from "On The Road" large excerpts, from those dozen or so works form the core of this compilation," The Portable Jack Kerouac". That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac's death, are under the sign of this six hundred page `teaser'.

And 'teaser' is exactly the right word, for anthologies in general, but Kerouac's work in particular. I have tried in previous reviews to start to distinguish between what you NEED to read of Kerouac's and what is merely repetitious. The editor, who is very familiar with Kerouac's work both a devotee and something of an early and definite biography, has taken pains to give excerpts from all the main volumes mentioned above like "Dharma Bums", "Maggie Cassady" , "Vanities Of Duluoz" and the like. The problem for me is that they just whetted my appetite. However for the novice this should be the place to start AFTER you have read the master work "On The Road". As for self-styled aficionados like myself what is probably more interesting is various miscellany, poems, interviews and the like that give a better sense of this tormented working class fellaheen's writing thoughts. Nicely done for an anthology.

For a true kerouac reader, i think it's worth it to work through this book. It's long, but a good part of it is the editor talking, a woman who has a true love of Kerouac. It's a little bit of everything, from his letters, to his ideas on buddhism(my personal fave) It's a good, but long, read

When I was 23 I decided to take a college course on Jack Kerouac toward my English degree, because I love reading and thought Jack Kerouac would be cool. He seemed like someone hipsters adored, and a lot of men I know who also smoke pot seemed to love his work. I dove into the class excited to learn about one of the greatest voices of the last century. The class was in his hometown of Lowell, MA, furthering my coolness in my own mind. I can appreciate Shakespeare, David Sedaris, Chinua Achebe, Chelsea Handler, Stieg Larsson, JK Rowling, Chuck Palahniuk... a VARIETY of different authors. I've studied different kinds of literature. I don't know why, and maybe I just don't have the grip on writing that I think I do... but I don't get Kerouac. His diehard fans have told me I'm a fool and I "Just don't get it", but honestly.. yeah, I just don't get it. It reminds me of the things I write in notebooks when I'm hammered, which although can be enlightening every once in a while, really just amount to babbling gibberish.