The Town and the City

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Masterpiece - Rated
I first read On the Road while a student in 1982 and liked it immensely. I ignored The Town and the City assuming that it would be a crummy Pre-Beat first novel by Kerouac. Big mistake! It is a wonderful book in the Tom Wolfe/Jack London tradition that Kerouac so loved. (Kerouac was originally John not Jack.) It tells the story of the Martin family in a sprawling but sensical way. I prefer parts 2 and 3 where Francis Martin meets strange men like Engels in the Galloway library. The prose at this point is truly magnificent - it is all rain and evocative descriptions. A wonderful book I recommend it to readers of all ages.

Before Beat - Rated
Before there ever was the Beat generation there was Jack trying to write. This is a book which proves to those who claim that Kerouac couldn't write properly that he was a capable writer. His prose is excellent and the characterisations lack the weirdness of his later novels.

The novel is based on small town America, and chronicles the life of what to Jack would have been an average American family, in the years upto and during the second world war. It is also full of personal observations of Jack's life, for those who want to know more about the writer. To us in the UK it is more like a history lesson, and a chance to glimpse what living in America used to be like before McDonalds strode across the world.

If you like stories that deal with relationships of you will like it, I promise you.

My favourite beat angel - Rated
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.

Kerouac's Best - Rated
Oddly enough, and against poplular criticism, I feel that by far this is Kerouac's best book. Rather than the 'travelogues' of his later work (which I don't mean to denigrate--they are spectacular), this is a thought out, true 'novel'. I've felt ever since I read it years ago that if he would have continued in this vein he'd be right up there with Hemingway et al, instead of a genre writer. Not that he was a mere 'genre writer' mind you. Without giving away any plot, the scene with his father at the end is the only thing I have ever in my life read that moved me to tears. There are hints of his later style as the book moves on, but the pure emotion, the feeling...he never equaled this book, and I think that affected the rest of his work. A true masterpiece; a couple of more like this and he'd have won a Nobel Prize. Just an amazing book.

Five stars for what it is - Rated
Ah Jack, young Jack. If only you'd held to the innocence of Town and ignored the City... but that wasn't possible, was it Jack? The town, for all its romance and squalor, just CAN'T BE, CAN NEVER BE as alive as the city. The town, for one thing, has no night. Mornings, yes, but no night.

Since you've already read On The Road, read this next. Understand that Jack was always just trying to be Good. And alive. And he had a hell of a time being both.