42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Kerouac's American Bohemia, January 9, 2002
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.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Achingly honest essential Beat, July 29, 1999
This review is from: The Subterraneans (Paperback)
Every couple of years, I feel compelled to pick up this book and re-read it just to experience again the beautiful, descriptive images of Kerouac's world of love captured and love relinquished. It's really interesting how he lets us follow the relationship he fosters with this young, hipster girl from its passionate genesis to its inevitable demise. All the time, we try to steer him in certain directions, try to coax him to say and do things that will continue the romance because he makes us want it to work. Nevertheless, we are swept up in the rhythm of the prose, hanging on every emotion, applying it to similar relationships in our lives. I'd say its absolutely essential reading for people who have just severed ties with another person. The locomotive rush of the writing style painfully captures the images and burns them into our minds, often difficult and obscure in certain areas, but we understand them on a far more unconscious level. I'll probably pick it up again in the not-so-distant future. It's a classic.
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23 of 25 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.
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