Customer Reviews

The town and the city

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Yes, this is Kerouac's first published novel. Yes, it is fundamentally autobiographical. Yes, it is stylistically derivative of Thomas Wolfe's epic novels. But there is more here for Kerouac devotees than these standard descriptions.

First, when centered between the works written immediately before and after The Town and the City (specifically, the selections of short pieces recently published in Atop an Underwood and Kerouac's second published novel, On the Road)a clear picture of a writer's development emerges. The Town and the City has a sustained narrative that builds to a satisfying conclusion. This would change over time as Kerouac became more focused on episodic writing in his novels--for instance, lengthy descriptions of jazz club settings in The Subteraneans, or maybe the best example, the tape transcriptions of conversations with Neal Cassady in Visions of Cody--and found little need for pure resolution. The beginning of this shift is noticeable in On the Road, when the detailed re-creation of a car ride takes precedent over plot. This type of writing is not to be found in The Town and the City.

Second, Kerouac's development as a human being presents itself as his themes are precipitated by the death of his father and the implicit responsibility for his family Kerouac (embodied in the character of Peter) would wrestle with for the rest of his life.

Third, Kerouac, almost shockingly, finds his literary voice in the final two-hundred pages of the novel. While most of the book moves along with the languid prose of a young writer imitating his idols, the "City" sections show Kerouac opening up, taking more risks, and discovering the type of writing that would become his trademark: Rythmic, unique, and energized accounts of characters almost willing their lives to unfold before them, and dead-on, perfectly real dialogue that makes you believe Kerouac had a tape recorder with him everywhere he went.

Finally, for those who've studied Kerouac's life and those that have visited his hometown of Lowell, you will see Kerouac struggling to fictionalize people, places, and events. This is a struggle he pretty much abandoned with On The Road, going so far as to use "Real Names" in the original draft. It is especially apparent in The Town and the City when Waldo committs suicide by jumping out of a window at Kenneth Wood's apartment. This episode was undoubtedly based on Lucien Carr's murder of David Kammerer. But Kerouac changes the murder to a suicide, and then attempts to fill Kenneth Wood with the same guilt Lucien Carr felt over the incident by implying that Kenneth might have pushed Waldo out the window. The result? It's not believable. Something Kerouac himself must have felt.

Kerouac claimed that the original inspiration for his spontaneous prose style was a forty-page letter he received from Neal Cassady before writing On the Road. The Town and the City shows Kerouac was already discovering a voice of his own and exploring the places and people that would dominate his fiction for the remainder of his career. It was that letter, though, that hurled him into a different realm, showing him the possibilities of a wild, new bop prosody, later leading to a recognition of Kerouac as a pioneering, risk-taking, totally unique writer. Had Cassady never sent that letter, we might well be talking of Kerouac today as a stylistic extension of Thomas Wolfe, or we may not be talking of him at all. Still, The Town and the City proves, with or without Neal's letter, Kerouac had greatness in him all along.

The Town And The City tracks the lives of the Martin family (5 sons and 3 daughters) growing up, living loving and discovering themselves, the world and others in the small town of Galloway in Massachusetts in the early 1900's. From the football star, to the lonely scholar, to the forever wandering heartbreaker of a truck driver, Kerouac deals with each of the siblings separately, describing their very different lives and in doing so, gives us the readers, a glimpse into each of their souls.

The book can be read as a largely autobiographical account of Kerouac's life, with each of the Martin sons representing alternative parts of himself, his feelings, thoughts and personality. Alternatively, the reader can lose themselves in the lives of the Martin family without concerning themselves with the real or the elaborated.

Kerouac reaches the reader with soaring, descriptive writing, which transform the mundane and everyday into feelings and emotions which describe the things you've always thought and felt but could never articulate into words...

"He was sick now with a crying lonesomeness, he somehow knew that all moments were farewell, all life was goodbye."

Kerouac himself describes the book as, "The sum of myself as far as the written word can go." The great American novel? Possibly, but this book is definately an essential for all Kerouac fans, people who have ever wondered what somebody else was thinking and all those who have raged on into the lonely night looking for an `angelheaded hipster' to give them meaning.

This book is a poingnant tale of the trials of life, as seen through the eyes of a boy, who watches his family changing and aging, even as he does the same.

Peter Martin's reactions to everyday life are heartwrenchingly accurate. We watch his family scatter throughout the earth with the onset of WWII, and see first-hand the devastating repercussions of the war on this all-too-real household.

The Town and the City was Kerouac's first novel, and what a work of literature to call your first! He was compared numerous times to Thomas Wolfe upon the first publishing, and it's no wonder. Filled with lush description and prose, this book will take your breath away and break your heart. For those who are skeptical of Kerouac's sometimes chaotic "spontaneous prose" style, fear not. While The Town and the City echoes the spontaneity of Kerouac's future works, it also contains a solid, beautiful sructure to relish and savor. Intricate layers of life intertwined so delicately they will make you cry, I promise you it will be highlighted, tattered and dogeared in a very short time.

If you're looking for a book you can keep at your bedside that contains any kind of pre-sleep passage you could long for (from jubilant to forlorn, and everything in between), this is it. The Town and the City is the book you feel inside you everyday, playing out as the very essence of living itself, and the most beautiful thing of all is that it's already been written for you to enjoy again and again.

It is rare that I've had the feeling that I didn't want a novel to end -- this one did that to me. No exageration! -- an absolute joy for me to read! Pure magic! I've read "On the Road" a few years back which I liked a lot, but T&C...I don't know, maybe I've changed some over the years to were I appreciate more of Kerouac's passion for life and his sublime sense of existential angst that comes with it. Reading "The Town and The City" was the closest I've gotten with literature of leaving myself and going there. This book is beautiful!

For hipster Kerouac gurus and one-time readers of On the Road alike, The Town and the City offers a much needed pre-spotlight autobiographical perspective on an incredibly fascinating and elusive author. For those who have read much of his work, picking up T&C is like opening a time capsule and taking a peek at Picasso when he cast his first brush stroke. For those that don't understand, let me shed light. Upon the publication of On the Road (Kerouac's critically acclaimed second novel), Kerouac became a literary folk hero. His writing style for that book was experimental by his own definitions...completely on a limb from the great american novelists he lists as his influences. Where Kerouac had once been fascinated with the intricate stories of the individual and the family, he became fantastically famous for stories of expansive adventure and spastic interpersonal relationships. What many don't know is that behind the guise of the first beatnik wanderer lurks a "great american novel" of entirely different proportions. A novel tailor-made to Thomas Wolfe proportions, so much that it borrows heavily on language, style, and even historical development aspects. Read back to back with Look Homeward Angel (Wolfe), the Town and The City becomes a remarkable way spy on an artist experimenting with style and drawing upon his own childhood and library to craft something of epic proportions for a freshman effort.

At the risk of making Kerouac roll over a couple of times in his grave, I would describe his first novel as endearing. There is a certain simplicity, a certain hesitancy in this work that is lacking from his other novels and makes The Town and the City a bit unique from the rest of his output. It is by no accident that the novel begins in the present tense as the author takes the reader on a guided tour of sorts in and around the town of Galloway: "The town is Galloway. The Merrimac River, broad and placid, flows down to it from the New Hampshire hills ..." Each of the members of the Martin family is introduced in this same immediate way: "Francis Martin is always moping and sulking. Francis is tall and skinny ...", etc. The result of this approach is that Kerouac, not unlike in a play, has essentially given stage directions for the novel, putting flesh to characters and setting the location of the drama which is to come. And what follows is quite extraordinary for a first novel.

Perhaps because Kerouac found it easier to write autobiography from a more objective point of view, he divided himself into what is essentially three different characters: Peter (the character who most resembles the novelist), Joe (the older brother who strikes up a friendship with a Neal Cassady-like character), and Francis (the surviving twin of the saintly Julian who is a scholar, aloof and a loner). As is indicated by the title, the novel is divided into two major parts: the portion that takes place in Galloway (a very thinly veiled version of Lowell, Massachusetts) and later in New York City. The "town" portion of the novel is written with deliberativeness, paying particular attention to detail, and is (as every other reader has remarked) very similar to the style of Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel. The "city" portion, although still indebted to Wolfe, begins to show hints of the Kerouac style which is to come, with a few touches of the stream of conscousness style that would ultimately best describe his writings.

Towards the end of the book it appears that Kerouac was wrestling with himself as the need to finish The Town and the City began to conflict with the artistic changes that were occuring within the author. While he was completing the final editing of The Town and the City, he was already making notes for the work that would come next, On the Road. The final chapter of Kerouac's first novel describes Peter hitchhiking, "traveling the continent westward". It was clear that, to Kerouac, lifestyle and art had become a little bit of the same thing.

This book gets my vote for The Great American Novel edging out F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.

With passionate prose and a realistic events (traits common to first novels in my opinion) Kerouac lays out three main sections that are immediately familiar to an American reader and provides a window into the social development of the United States in a critical period in our history.

The first section is a portrait of growing up and the American family. In the second section the nation goes off to World War II and the protagonist comes of age shedding his innocence. The third section deals with the pyschological aftermath a war has on a society in a more uniquely Kerouac prose of jazz, drugs and the struggle of a "lost generation" to find happiness.

I just can't remember reading any other novel where on every page I couldn't help but thinking this IS the American experience. Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Huck Finn...these are all a slice of American life, but Kerouac gives us the whole apple pie with The Town and the City.

I had read virtually everything ever written by Jack, excluding
this book, because I'd heard it was his "Tom Wolf" novel and he'd
yet to develop his own style...so after all these years I finally
got around to reading it...and was absolutely overwhelmed by
how great it is...so if you're a Kerouac lover and haven't read
this "family saga" yet, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Other reviewers have described it well, so I'll just mention two
highlights...both in the "City" section: the first is where
Levinsky (Allen Ginsberg of course) plays head games with people
on a New York subway car (beginning around p. 376) and the second
is this fantastic/funny/brilliant monologue about marijuana and
cockroaches, (around p. 403). In a way, I'm glad I waited all
this time to finally get around to reading this wonderful novel.

When, as a young man, Jack Kerouac penned this saga of the Martin family (thinly veiled reprentations of Kerouac's own family and friends), he could have scarcely imagined the cult that would arise surrounding his name, image and spirit. But fifty years later, here we are reading his initial entry to his legend. Obviously patterned after the hero of his early years, Thomas Wolfe, the book is very much character driven. In fact, that element of The Town and the City is probably the most obvious thread connecting this work to his later, revolutionary works i.e. "Tristessa", "Dr. Sax" and, of course, "On The Road". It is clear from the beginning that Kerouac was more interested in attitudes, behaviors, loves and losses (pardon the cliche) than telling a particular type of "story". That willingness to focus on every day people in their every day lives is what makes Kerouac so unique (aside from his later radical approaches to "style") and so American. Read the previous sentence and, if one is unfamilar with Kerouac, a person might think, "Gee, doesn't that sound dull." But the ability to take the seemingly mundane and infuse it with extraordinary attention to detail, enthusiam and a willingness to see the wonder in just being alive is, in my opinion, Kerouac's most pronounced claim to genius (read excerpts from his journals in the recently released "Windblown World" describing his cross-continent bus rides, for example). As far as The Town and the City goes, it stands on it's own (and proves beyond doubt that Kerouac's later path down the Spontaneous Prose road was hugely courageous as he could have easily settled into a respected literary career writing in a more conventional manner), but if one has a specific interest in Kerouac, as opposed to just wanting to read a good book, this work is fascinating as a precursor to the wonder that was to come. It's interesting to note that many of Kerouac's "On The Road" exploits were occurring while this book was being written. It's all there in The Town and the City, just below the surface, and about to change the world.

This semi-autobiographical work covering the life and times of Jack Kerouac before he went "On the Road" comes full circle. It begins in the small town of Galloway, Massachusettes, wends its way to the city of New York, then finally returns to Galloway. Peter Martin has a large, nurturing, and close knit family. As happens in many families, as the children grow older and become young adults, they begin to drift apart from the family unit. Peter, who achieves fame as a college football star, later tires of college and small town life, and falls captive to the lure of New York City, where he meets several bohemian types, two of whom are readily identifiable as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Francis, one of Peter's brothers, gets accepted into Harvard and falls in with a bookish, intellectual sort of man. One of the Martin sisters, Liz, decides to run off with a musician who specializes in be-bop. Added to this equation are family financial woes, a father with a gambling problem, and the start of the second world war, in which a couple of the brothers enlist in the armed services to fight the war against fascism in Europe.

I have to admit that I was occasionally put off by Kerouac's tendency to over sentimentalize the events in the life of the Martin family, but what Kerouac has by and large created is a warm and loving portrait of the complex nature of family relationships. The book shows, perhaps surprisingly, that people most often have the most heatedly passionate arguments with those family members whom they most love. What especially stood out for me in this book was Peter's Galloway friendship with Alexander Panos, a particularly sensitive and emotional young Greek-American who wrote poetry. There was also a strange and very funny scene in a New York subway where Martin's Jewish-American friend utilizes a unique method to "spy" on another rider, perhaps foreshadowing the Jack Kerouac that came after _The Town and the City_.