"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?-- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
Jack Kerouac's On the Road is one of those novels that my sixteen-year-old self would have loved-- so why did it take me until now to read it?
This tale of soul-searching in 1940s America features Sal Paradise, the narrator, and his buddy, the cool/manic/alcoholic Dean Moriarty. His name alone invokes images of a man dripping with cool. In the end, though, his legend gives way to reality, and Sal and Dean end up diverging in their paths. The trip must end.
My younger self would undoubtedly have romanticized this story. The idea of criss-crossing the country on a whim, peeking into the varied lives of ordinary people, all while partying and getting into shenanigans with your closest buddies, sounds like a fun way to soul-search, if not one that's filled with debauchery. Truthfully, though, I'm glad that I waited until I was a bit older to read On the Road. While this is essentially a story of a young man's search for meaning and truth, the romanticism that my teenaged self would likely have imposed on that search would not have done this novel justice. Rather than spout a manic tale of drug-fueled truth-finding, Kerouac showed that the search for meaning can be heartbreaking and cruel and messy and incomplete. How can anyone find happiness and meaning in a world that had just endured a World War? The Beat Generation sought to find out.
The journeying and constant motion in pursuit of some sort of truth define this novel. Ultimately, there are no easy answers, and it's unclear whether any true meaning has been grasped. But that's okay. The journey is the story. Sal ultimately chooses a conventional life after his travels, having been abandoned by Dean earlier on. And while there might be some sadness in that, I think it's the only way for Sal to have a chance at happiness. Dean represents the alternative, the ceaseless wandering without commitment, which, while maybe serving as a way to gain freedom in the beginning, ultimately seems sad and even a bit heartbreaking. But even with all that, the tug of nostalgia for the road and for the figure of Dean Moriarty remains.
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
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100 Best Novels
1. "Ulysses," James Joyce
5. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley
6. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner
8. "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler
9. "Sons and Lovers," D. H. Lawrence
10. "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck
11. "Under the Volcano," Malcolm Lowry
12. "The Way of All Flesh," Samuel Butler
14. "I, Claudius," Robert Graves
16. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser
17. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Carson McCullers
19. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison
21. "Henderson the Rain King," Saul Bellow
22. "Appointment in Samarra," John O' Hara
23. "U.S.A." (trilogy), John Dos Passos
24. "Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson
25. "A Passage to India," E. M. Forster
27. "The Ambassadors," Henry James
29. "The Studs Lonigan Trilogy," James T. Farrell
30. "The Good Soldier," Ford Madox Ford
32. "The Golden Bowl," Henry James
33. "Sister Carrie," Theodore Dreiser
34. "A Handful of Dust," Evelyn Waugh
35. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner
36. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren
37. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder
38. "Howards End," E. M. Forster
39. "Go Tell It on the Mountain," James Baldwin
40. "The Heart of the Matter," Graham Greene
42. "Deliverance," James Dickey
43. "A Dance to the Music of Time" (series), Anthony Powell
44. "Point Counter Point," Aldous Huxley
46. "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad
47. "Nostromo," Joseph Conrad
48. "The Rainbow," D. H. Lawrence
49. "Women in Love," D. H. Lawrence
50. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller
52. "Portnoy's Complaint," Philip Roth
53. "Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov
54. "Light in August," William Faulkner
56. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett
57. "Parade's End," Ford Madox Ford
58. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton
59. "Zuleika Dobson," Max Beerbohm
60. "The Moviegoer," Walker Percy
61. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," Willa Cather
62. "From Here to Eternity," James Jones
63. "The Wapshot Chronicles," John Cheever
65. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess
66. "Of Human Bondage," W. Somerset Maugham
67. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad
68. "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis
69. "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton
70. "The Alexandria Quartet," Lawrence Durrell
71. "A High Wind in Jamaica," Richard Hughes
72. "A House for Ms. Biswas," V. S. Naipaul
73. "The Day of the Locust," Nathaniel West
75. "Scoop," Evelyn Waugh
77. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce
78. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling
79. "A Room With a View," E. M. Forster
80. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh
81. "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow
82. "Angle of Repose," Wallace Stegner
83. "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul
84. "The Death of the Heart," Elizabeth Bowen
85. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad
86. "Ragtime," E. L. Doctorow
87. "The Old Wives' Tale," Arnold Bennett
89. "Loving," Henry Green
90. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie
91. "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell
92. "Ironweed," William Kennedy
93. "The Magus," John Fowles
94. "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys
95. "Under the Net," Iris Murdoch
96. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron
97. "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles
98. "The Postman Always Rings Twice," James M. Cain
99. "The Ginger Man," J. P. Donleavy
100. "The Magnificent Ambersons," Booth Tarkington
