Gagging, one draws the line.Ī line more like a noose, for something larger is at stake here than yet another bad book.

The last, the final one: 'Happy, happy, the little gasoline fumes,' eulogizes. He is celebrating life again-with ruthless inclusiveness, down to the last molecule. Perhaps none of this would much matter, if only the book were a fresh departure, instead of merely another version of the single, interminable matter if only the book were a fresh book that Kerouac has been writing all these years. Proclaim and the characters are as fatuous in life as in art and, as if to deny us even a low pleasure, Kerouac goes to considerable pains to identify his friends and business associates, stopping just short of spelling their names correctly.Īnd for future historians of defunct movements who after plumbing the archives still do not know the poet of (as it is here) 'Howling' or the author of 'Nude Supper,' Seymour Krim provides the key in his exegetical introduction. But if the term is to retain a shred of meaning, the book is not a novel, whatever the dust jacket may Jack Kerouac's indifferently awaited 'Desolation Angels' might appeal to our basest nature as a roman à clef. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.F it were in fact a novel, and if the prototypes were at all interesting, and if it succeeded with some craft and art in playing the game of identity, Jack Kerouac was a 'writer' as his great peer William S. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later 20th century, a synthesis of Proust, Celine, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. 'Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. defines the sensibilites of members of his own subgeneration: we knew them as wearing such guises as the Beat Generation, the Subterraneans, the Dharma Bums now we see them as Desolation Angels, sadly pursuing their empty futilities.' He was also a force, a tragedy, a triumph, and an ongoing influence, and that influence is still with us.' 'Kerouac was a breath of fresh air when he came on the literary scene. 'One of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature.'

'If the Pulitzer Prize were given for the book that is most representative of American life, I would nominate Desolation Angels.'

Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac