Jack Kerouac. Whatever.

Another article in the latest New Criterion that Miss Edith enjoyed very much because it made her feel warm inside was Anthony Daniels’ thing about how Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is totally fucking overrated.

When did you first read On the Road? Almost certainly you were in high school, and it was one of the few books you read that wasn’t actually required for homework. Anyone who’s read this book, as far as I can tell, read it like that. I know I did. And I remember that there was a passage that made a big impression on my little 14 year old mind – something, I think, about Terry’s first appearance in the book – but the truth is I can’t remember a thing about it now. And the last time that I tried to remember it was – this I remember clearly – when I was nineteen and traveling on a Vermont Transit bus, trying to make conversation with a young man who was traveling to his job teaching at a boarding school in Putney. He was reading On the Road, and because we were the only two people on the bus under the age of 40, we tried to chat with each other. And we did chat, fairly happily, until we both got off the bus in Brattleboro and went our separate ways. I think his name was Chet. But see, this is my point – I remember Chet and that Vermont Transit trip a hell of a lot better than I remember On the Road, which is supposed to be so important to me since I am, after all, supposed to be one of these artsy types.

I remember that I sort of enjoyed On the Road when I first read it. I liked at least the first 75 or so pages. I then went and made the mistake of buying several other Kerouac books – Dr. Sax, I’m pretty sure, and The Dharma Bums, and, oh yes, I remember buying Pic; and I never made it through any of them. I was certainly an ambitious reader in those days but the truth was that my eyes were bigger than my stomach more often than not. I found Kerouac painfully boring. I gave up on him and have never looked back.

One of the funny observations I’ve made through years and years as a bookseller is that I can generally tell whether or not people are going to annoy me horribly based on the books they like. I know that a guy who likes Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Hesse, and Jack Kerouac a little too much is a guy who, well, let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t want to be romantically involved with this guy. I’m not saying he’s guaranteed to be an asshole. I just mean that our temperaments would not mesh well. I was glad to read Mr. Daniels’s article. It made me feel like maybe I haven’t been crazy all these years. I mean, sure, Capote said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” but that in itself isn’t enough of a critique to really take seriously (genius though it is, in its way). Daniels’s essay was, like Mr. Epstein’s, writing that made me nod my head in agreement. It made me feel like I was not alone in my frustration with this hero worship – because that’s what it is. Hero worship. And I don’t think Kerouac is worth worshipping.

As you were, readers.