The Subterraneans (An Avon book) (Paperback)

by Jack Kerouac (Author), Henry Miller (Foreword) "ONCE I WAS YOUNG and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much..." (more)
Key Phrases: Heavenly Lane, San Francisco, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bitter-sweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as being Kerouac's most touching and tender book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author
Jack Kerouac wrote a number of highly influential and popular novels - most famously the international best-seller ON THE ROAD - and is remembered as one of the key figures of the legendary Beat generation. As much as anything, he came to represent a philosophy, a way of life. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 126 pages
• Publisher: Avon Pub (January 1, 1959)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0007FOCOI
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,093,169 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kerouac's American Bohemia, January 9, 2002

By	Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Subterraneans (Paperback)

The Subterraneans is an autobigraphical novel based on a summer love affair between Kerouac and a young black woman in New York City in 1953. The setting of the story was moved to San Francisco at the behest of the publisher.

The book tells the story of the love, and its end, between Leo Percepied, the Kerouac character, and Mardou Fox. Mardou is half Cherokee and half black. She has grown up in poverty in Oakland and has suffered serious emotional breakdowns. She has gone from lover to lover among the Bohemia of San Fransisco until she meets up with Leo.

The book shows some of Kerouac's understanding of his own character. He describes himself (page 1) as both an "unself-confident man" and as an "egomaniac". A few pages later (page 3) he confesses that "I am crudely malely sexual and cannot help myself and have lecherous and so on propensities as almost all my male readers no doubt are the same."

The Subterraneans are a group of hipsters, aspiring artists, drop-outs, con men who inhabit that bars and streets of San Fransiscon graphically described in this book. The book is full of mean streets, cold water flats, alleys, run-down stores, cheap bars, late evenings, pushcarts, and sad mornings.

Leo is initally sexually attracted to Mardou. When he learns and listens to her he truly falls in love. She is indeed a lovable character. The picture of the love is convincing. Unfortunately Leo/Kerouac remained throughout his life a mother's boy. Mardou tells him, properly and sensibly "Leo, I don't think it good for you to live with your mother always" (p47) Leo nonetheless can't part from his mother. He also has doubts about his ability to commit to a black woman, particularly given the prejudice of his mother and sister. He dumps Mardou. It is his loss.

The book is written in long stringy sentences to imitate the "bop" improvisatory style of jazz riffs. I was put of by the style when I began the book but came away concluding it fit the subject matter. The apparent spontaneity and the sincerity of the narrative move the story along.

The book describes well the American hipster of the 1950s. It is ultimately a story of the need for love and the difficulty of commitment. It is a sad story and I think in the emphasis on the wildness of Bohemia can easily be misunderstood. Kerouac may have been somewhat wiser as a writer than he was as a man. He was able to take his inability to form a lasting relationship with a woman and describe it. He turned his experiences and personal difficulties into a poignant and lasting novel. Art in Kerouac as in so many writers becomes a way of understanding and transcending one's life.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kerouac puts truth, poetry, and a little madness on paper, March 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Subterraneans (Paperback)

Anyone who has read more than one novel by Jack Kerouac knows that his style varies. In Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes with atypical lucidity. In Big Sur (what I think is his greatest novel), he goes an entire first chapter with the use of one period. Of the five books by Kerouac I have read (the fifth book being On The Road), Subterraneans reads the most like Tristessa. The style of each book is more fractured than in the others, making it sometimes more difficult to follow. But in each book Kerouac finds a stride and rhythm to his work that soon carries the reader away. In Subterraneans, Kerouac tells the story of a relationship with Mardou Fox, a part Native-American, part African-American, mentally barely stable, twenty-one year old woman. Though Kerouac is almost 10 years older, they seem a great match. As usual, Kerouac's tale takes him through bar- and apartment-hopping parties, intellectual upheavals, drunken sprawling adventures, and bitter hangover realizations. The thread of unity throughout is the experience of his evolving relationship with Mardou, his deep self-realizations, his anger, love, and pain. When I finished the book I knew Kerouac had once again found something true amid his temporary madnesses and put it on paper for me to read. I closed the book and felt I had read something beautiful. Kerouac, you did it again.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tragic rolling hip love story from the master of free form., February 5, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Subterraneans (Paperback)

This is the best book I have ever read. The story, the characters, the mood, the language is all like a gray sunset morning on a dirty street in San Francisco. Kerouac is a poet and a story teller. His words are paranoiac but tender. He tells of his experience with a band of underground hipsters know as 'the subterraneans' in the context of a mad drunken love affair with Mardou Fox, an angst ridden angel of the city