This is really two books – the first book, Desolation Angels, was actually rather tedious, and I was at first regretting I had even started to read this at all. It also didn't help that I’d read about his stint as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak twice before (Lonesome Traveler, Dharma Bums) so I'd more than had my fill already – I was starting to feel (Buddhism, schmuddism) I couldn’t care less. It was Gary Snyder that inspired him to go there (mountains and sutras both, I guess) in the first place, and Kerouac, being his good ol' honest self, here eventually gets disenchanted with that entire Buddhist disenchantment. Not that this is an uninteresting development - it just takes him too many rambling pages to get there.
The second book, Passing Through, he had originally intended to publish as a separate book, and if so I'd probably have given it a four star rating. Here Kerouac brings his disenchantment with him to Mexico, back to New York; to Tangiers, Paris and London, again back to New York and from there all through America to San Francisco - and back again.. - In Tangiers: "...there's poor Irwin at midnight calling up to me from the garden 'Come on down Jack-Kee, there’s a big bunch of hipsters and chicks from Paris in Bull's room.' And just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they are all hunching around in marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag after all and at the time (1957) not even started yet officially with the name of 'Beat Generation.' .... Nothing can be more dreary than 'coolness' (not Irwin's cool, or Bull's or Simon's, which is natural quietness) but postured, actually secretly rigid coolness that covers up the fact that the character is unable to convey anything of force or interest, a kind of sociological coolness soon to become a fad up into the mass of middle-class youth for awhile. There’s even a kind of insultingness, probably unintentional, like when I said to the Paris girl just fresh she said from visiting a Persian Shah for Tiger hunt 'Did you actually shoot the tiger yourself?' she gave me a cold look as tho I’d just tried to kiss her at the window of a Drama School." - (Irwin=Ginsberg, Bull=Burroughs, Simon=Orlovsky) - He leaves and heads to Paris, which isn't much better, and where Raphael Urso (Gregory Corso) takes him to "meet disagreeable American beatniks in apartments and bars and all that’s 'cool' comes on again, only it's Easter and the fantastic candy stores in Paris have chocolate fishes in their windows three feet long." He ends up spending the entire night translating his girlfriends French to him, and further ends up having to pay the bar bill, with just enough money left to get him to London. "I'm mad as hell at Raphael for making me spend all that money and there he is yelling at me again how greedy and nowhere I am. (...) In the morning I sneak out with the excuse a girl is waiting for me in a cafe, and I never come back. I just walk all over Paris with the bag on my back looking so strange even the whores of St Denis dont look at me. I buy my ticket to London and eventually go."
Here’s the Kerouac that I like: "no fiction, no craft, no revising afterthoughts, the heartbreaking discipline of the veritable fire ordeal where you cant go back but have made the vow of "speak now or forever hold your tongue" and all of it innocent go-ahead confession," as he puts it in the first part of Passing Through, and after the dullness (of too much introvert desolation maybe) of the first book, it was a relief to find that the second contained some of the better of his writings.




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Jack is in northwest Washington for a fire lookout job - with no liquor or drugs! Then, when the job is done, he hitchhikes to Seattle. Then a bus to San Francisco, rucksack still in hand. And then he “…hopped that freight down to L.A. and headed for Old Mexico and a resumption of my solitude in a hovel in the city.” Then, off to NYC! And then, a boat ride across the sea to Tangiers! Over to Europe, back to the U.S., then across the country with his mom. Then back.

Well, I liked this book much more the first time I read it. This time, I just liked it okay. I don't remember Kerouac being so whiny. Even when "On the Road" is published near the end of this novel, he just seems put out. I thought I remembered this book as a fun adventure story, but this time around, it felt more like a sad man who is lost and all alone in the fame he thought he wanted. ( )

Re-read after many years, now older than Jack ever experienced.

This doesn't hold up to my recollection, but how could it? Dharma Bums may be his only work still read, or worth reading, in a few more decades. It's all Jack, straight through. ( )

Desolation Angels is heaven and hell and the world and America and the Void and his Mom. Kerouac/Duluoz is a despicable, noble, earnest, loving, whiny, brilliant, loyal, weak, irreplaceable, insane jazz poet. As a preamble, listen to Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and realize how he creates surprisingly linear beauty tangentially, and then crank up the random-o-meter one hundred times for Kerouac. One thousand preliminarily random images turn into a masterful Pointillist painting in prose. Bebop improvisation touching on a particular theme from a million different angles placates those of us requiring a story if we are patient. His prose is so poetic at times that it’s exhausting; infinitely compressed like a neutron star. In Desolation Angels he is Dharma Bum, addict, alcoholic, villain, criminal, poet, preacher, seer, mystic and finally Penitente and Bodhisattva having simultaneously reached the gates of Heaven/Nirvana and found himself unforgivable. From Desolation Peak and Seattle to Frisco; to Mexico City and New York; across the Atlantic to Tangiers, Paris and London; from Florida to Berkeley and back again; Desolation Angels is “ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny;” his whole rucksack (lost and found); every work, every poem, every sketch every howl. Ginsberg, Dali, Burroughs are all there, the pantheon of crazy pathetic beat angels. ( )

This is my most favorite Kerouac book ( )