This is a bad book. It is readable enough and has a fairly distinctive voice. There’s even the odd funny moment too. It also has some very annoying habits. One of which is that the book has no discernable structure other than that all the material relates to the author! As such, she takes us on a random meander through the her life ages 0-30. The first 150 pages followed a strange narrative where we seem to cover childhood - school - uni - early work life on a kind of 50 page loop. Appended to this freestyle chronology are lists, recipes and imagined invitations to weddings, baby showers, hen do’s etc. Lord only knows who thought this was a good idea; it reads like someone has spliced a 14 year old’s journal with a cookbook, a therapy diary and a dating column. It comes as no surprise to learn the author cut her literary teeth as a blogger. The book reads like a series of blogs.
The constituent parts of this dog’s dinner are probably as good a place as any to start describing what I don’t like about this book. The lists aren’t funny and mostly have a combragging element or are designed to showcase the author’s amazing taste, sexual prowess or ‘outrageous’ behaviour. The recipes are downright Nigella-level posturing. A recipe for ‘Can’t be arsed ice cream?’ is a ludicrously contradictory concept. To any normal person not trying to market themselves as a lifestyle brand, ‘can’t be arsed ice cream’ is bought in a tub from a shop or, in extreme cases, a McFlurry ordered from UberEats. ‘PISS OFF’, I shouted at the offending page when I uncovered it. To compound the problem, the author not only wants to play the lifestyle guru dispensing tips from her fabulous life but also wants to convince you that her life is totally normal and she is the quintessential everywoman. This is obviously attractive from a commercial perspective but didn’t ring true to me. The same is true of her depiction of her love life. The imagined invitations weren’t funny either. They function as marketing pieces for the aspirational lifestyle she leads - baby showers, hen nights, holidays and countryside weddings - while simultaneously attempting to mock it and thus distance herself from it. This was yet another instance of the infuriating combragging that saturates the book. The most gratuitous example of this was the mock hen do invite detailing all the woes of the overblown and expensive farce they have become. This was followed, with no detectable irony, by a description of a hen do she herself organised for her darling BFF involving renting out the whole top floor of a hotel and recording a video message from their local MP. If this sounds like the hen do she arranged is actually far more OTT and ridiculous than the one she made up in a spoof; that’s because it is!! I concluded that the author is probably the very worst example of the type of people she pretends to mock while secretly being very much in thrall to the sort of absurd socialising she claims to be so weary of!
This final trait is very much in evidence when it comes to topics like money, class or priviledge. To be fair, the author does admit to going to posh boarding school but seems to describe this as almost a sort of accident that doesn’t reflect who she really is. She inexplicably claims she doesn’t identify with posh people and defines herself as ‘feeling on the outside of their club’ (p100) when her entire life screams, ‘public school!’ like a braying Etonian after a few Pimms. How else could you explain all of her flatmates donning wellies when they discover a mouse in their house in central London? She goes to Exeter uni, works in LK Bennett, has an international life, friends in high places and exotic men to date. One of the most gratuitous examples of this is her New York trip where she arrives and finds she has no money. Any normal person would just call their parents and ask for some money but Dolly goes through many convoluted explanations to make it quite clear that she struggled through on her own. The whole book has a suspicious whiff of clandestine financial backing. The non-stop drinking at uni while not having a job, the fancy dress parties and long taxi journeys despite being apparently penniless. Money just seems to miraculously appear in her life. Or she is given a really good deal. Or has a friend who will let her use her apartment. But never a single penny from the bank of M&D. I found it all a bit disingenuous and that was my problem with the whole book. It sort of seems to say, ‘anyone can do anything with a bit of derring-do’ but in reality you can only have a life like hers when you’re rich and she should probably acknowledge this.
The book certainly purports to be open and straightforward. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth with no embellishment or spin’ might be a decent approximation of the tone. My problem is that the author’s presentation of herself is stage managed to within an inch of its life and the ‘deeper’ parts of the book feel one dimensional and prepackaged. When I found out that the author wrote a blog about ‘Made In Chelsea’ and then did some work on the show developing the characters or the plot I suddenly thought, ‘That’s it!’. The book is a literary version of ‘Made In Chelsea’. It might feel a bit like reality at first but it’s actually a scripted presentation. Are the relationships and ‘narrative arcs’ of ‘Made In Chelsea’ real? There might be an element of truth in the story, if you’re lucky, but it is shaped, adjusted and sometimes invented to pique the most interest or cause the most controversy. In the same way, I felt like this book presented itself to be a kind of ‘warts n all’ confessional but was actually a fairly serious piece of marketing. A lot of what the book is doing is identical to reality TV. The author is trying to interest you in her life and those of a small-ish cast of friends and boyfriends. You hear of their drinking antics, their sexual conquests and their heartbreaks. But do you ever hear anything about their families or hear them say anything in an unscripted and genuinely candid environment? Of course not! Both are performative and want to give the impression of reality in order to commercialise it.
As it happens, the best bit of the book was one of the ‘deeper’ parts. Her description of her experience of anorexia was well articulated and spoke with real poignancy about how often society can unwittingly reward or reinforce unhealthy and obsessive behaviour. I feel it was a shame that so much of the rest of the book was scenes from a scripted reality show. ‘Dolly has a big night out with the girls’, ‘Dolly has a one night stand’, ‘Dolly consoles a friend on the tragic loss of a family member’. I felt the last one was in pretty poor taste and I would have been hopping mad if a friend tried to write about me losing a close family member while writing absolutely nothing about her own family life. The ‘narrative arc’ that ran through the whole book was the best friend vs best friend’s boyfriend plot, which must surely have been used hundreds of times already on reality TV shows. In this sense, lots of the book’s major themes felt a bit tired, shallow and simplified for ease of consumption.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the book was the author’s incredibly high opinion of herself. You may say that this should be taken as a given when someone is writing a book of advice before reaching 30 but I was still taken back at the sheer scale! The first inklings come when Ms Alderton describes her experiences upon leaving the warm embraces of boarding school and Exeter Uni, which sounds like boarding school anyway: ‘I even used to get a thrill sitting in the GP’s waiting room, knowing I registered and got myself there without the help of anyone else’ (p107). Wow. Stunning. Who paid for the GP? Oh? Everyone who pays tax? Would you consider that to be the ‘help of anyone else’? There is a gag-inducingly high level of self-congratulation throughout. Such seems to be the extent of the suburban mollycoddling, the author thinks of herself as unbelievably grown up for doing pretty much anything for herself.
The ‘look at me I’m so grown up’ soon turns into a David Brent-esque screech of, ‘look at me I’M MENTAL’ when the drinking and drug taking of uni and her early twenties set in. There is a serious excess of pretty tame beer stories told in a self-satisfied way that makes it clear she obviously considers herself a world class hellraiser, which she categorically is not. Most of these ‘wild’ stories involve having a drink with middle aged men, doing a can-can or taking an expensive taxi late at night.
Another telling indication of the author’s optimistic assessment of her own chat are the absolutely groan inducing jokes. For example, “The plan is that everyone will fancy him as they get drunker and realize he’s the best of a bad bunch. A bit like how we all felt about Nick Clegg in the 2010 election” (p124) ba-BOOM! I don’t read ‘The Sunday Times Magazine’ but imagine if it’s all this good?! She also sees fit to reproduce text message conversations with her friends or random boys verbatim. A surer symptom of narcissism has not yet been discovered.
There’s also lots of com-bragging about her exes terrible behaviour and / or high social standing (PhD boffin, good looking but wild city boy, musician, entrepreneur, guru) and implied boasting about her sexual prowess. It all adds to the very definite sense throughout the book that things are being manipulated to make more engaging / aspirational / relatable content!
Another example of the sort of posturing the author indulges in relates to her intelligence. When describing the punishments for drinking at boarding school she sort of pretends to be stupid. ‘Rustication, whatever that means’ (p108), she writes dismissively so as not to appear stuffy and posh. However later on she is quite happy to talk about her love of literature and brag about her intelligence. She even uses the word ‘lugubriously’! She quite plainly is interested in words and writing so why pretend otherwise? It’s a pathetic sham.
Other parts are shameless, schmaltzy self-promotion. I would direct those looking for supporting evidence to p251 where you will find gratuitous boasting about how she is the world’s best ever mate. The vomit inducing sentimentality crescendos to a final, almighty wretch of, ‘it takes a village to mend a broken heart’. This in spite of the fact she has spent the last few pages describing how really what you need to get over a broken heart is an amazing mate like her. Just look how she was woefully abandoned by her BFF in favour of a man but, nevertheless, appears by her side, steadfast and dependable, in her hour of need.
Some of my dislike for this book must simply be my dislike for the author as she has presented herself. In my mind, she is the kind of posh girl who refuses to admit they’re posh despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To make matters worse, as opposed to broadening her horizons after public school, she has then taken herself off to a god awful quasi-public school of a university: Exeter. It seems to be a less academic version of Durham from her descriptions; if such a horror can even be imagined! One thing the author does seem to enjoy fairly consistently is attention. Attention from men, attention from friends, attention from anyone really. Testament to this are the elaborately planned parties and abundance of fancy dress. I mean, whom, other than a bona fide attention seeker, would organise a fancy dress pub crawl to celebrate moving out of a flat? The whole book beseeches the reader to think of her as talented, entertaining, wild, interesting, funny and cool.
However, she also has a mixed relationship to her concept of coolness. She often claims not to be interested in it. A good example of this happens when she extols the virtues of living in Camden because it’s not cool only to then say the best bit about it is being able to do a drunken cancan in a bar and ‘comfortably still be the coolest people in the entire bar’ (p113). It seems perverse, and self-defeating, to claim to like living somewhere because no one cares about being cool while simultaneously claiming you’re cooler than everyone else! For me, Dolly is very obviously preoccupied with being cool. This whole book is a testimony to that fact and documentary evidence of it. Nonetheless, she is self-aware enough to realise that she must claim to be uncool or at least uninterested in the concept in order to be considered cool. The whole thing is an uneasy mixture of insecurity about being a loser and entitled belief that she’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Given that my assessment of this book has been pretty scathing, I feel like I should try to appreciate the books merits briefly before we conclude. First, this is a book by a young woman about what life is like as a young woman. This alone makes the book far less common than insufferably self-satisfied renditions of the antics of youth written by men; of which there are many! In this sense, I am, perhaps, not the target audience for this book because I am a man. In another sense, a really good book should offer something to every reader but that’s for another day. Looking at this book in the best possible light, it is an entertaining and honest look at a young, female life when an overwhelming majority of literature aimed at this demographic simply reinforces stereotypes rather than challenges them. I don’t feel like the author has been that honest or is that entertaining but that is a subjective matter and I’ve covered the reasons why at length.
As I try to think of concluding comments about this book I’m reminded of the author’s friend who tells her she must choose between being “the woman who parties harder than anyone else or the woman who works harder than anyone else” (p118). This friend obviously didn’t have a very wide social circle. Like her beer stories, and the whole book, it’s all vacuous, overblown nonsense and outlandishly self-important fantasy.
Monday 29 July 2019
Sunday 28 July 2019
Jack Kerouac - Dharma Bums
I had a very negative reaction to some of this book and a very positive reaction to other parts of it. It’s an original, infuriating, engaging and arrogant mixture of half-baked philosophical insights interspersed with some profound sagacity. I suppose I can hardly call it a bad book with all the sensations and sentiments it aroused in me.
Let’s start with a paragraph on what you can know about this somewhat scattered narrative. Ray Smith, an older than college age man but probably no older than 40, used to be a ‘lionized’ young author but now lives as a ‘dharma bum’. He rolls around hitchhiking, jumping trains, getting drunk, fraternising with a literary bohemian crowd, thinks about Buddhism, writes poetry and prays. He seems to have been involved in an academic institution at one stage as he makes reference to his stipend or scholarship money. The prose and narrative rattle along in such an uneven and helter skelter way that it’s hard to recall every precise detail. In the course of the book, he goes to visit his friend / crush Japhy who appears to be an academic at Berkeley. I think Smith meets Japhy in the course of the book but becomes so infatuated with him and eulogises about him at such length it feels like he is a much older friend. Smith thinks Japhy is cooler than a polar bear's toenails and looks up to him as some kind of mentor or role model. The relentless commentary on just how great Japhy is could be read as repressed homoeroticism, especially when he talks about how Japhy is ‘a real man’, but, in the main, I just found it boring, a bit ridiculous and then faintly nauseating. Anyway, the pair pass a while together living in Japhy’s shack in a larger property’s garden and take a hike up a mountain before Smith goes hitchhiking home to visit his family. He returns, spends more time with Japhy, they take another hike, Japhy goes to Japan on some project or other. Smith goes to live on top of a mountain as a forest fire lookout in Washington state; a job that Japhy did the year before him but can’t repeat because of his Japanese voyage.
So what is there to like and dislike? Let’s start with the good stuff and finish off with some scathing criticisms! First, and most importantly, the idea of spontaneity and immediacy in writing. This was especially relevant to me as I am struggling to complete several longer book reviews while I was reading this book. The repeated appeals to these values struck a chord with me and made me feel that I may be guilty of overvaluing comprehensiveness and complexity in my reactions over authenticity and speed! As someone who is always going off on tangents, I felt like this was a really valuable point. Ordinarily, I would probably look up some things about the author and the places mentioned in the book before I start writing but I resolved to write something as soon after finishing as I could and I’m writing this no more than an hour or so after completing the book.
Something else I really loved and admired was the overflowing enthusiasm and love the author has for nature and the outdoors. His descriptions of the euphoria of being in nature and the sheer joy of hard physical exertion, a feeling of self-sufficiency, having minimal material things but being well equipped for your environment, freedom and independence are all spot on. He’s also brilliant in his acerbic reflections on society and mainstream life as he seems it, for example:
“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what?” (p166)
I also couldn’t help myself from liking his wild enthusiasm and belief in what he is doing. Simultaneously, the arrogance could be grating but the feelings it evoked were wonderful. A sort of, “who-gives-a-fuck, we know better than everyone and are experiencing things those idiots couldn’t even imagine”. Obnoxious stuff, to be sure, but also enchanting in the way they want to do something different, throw two fingers up at conventional knowledge and are totally committed to that cause. The self-belief and self-satisfaction are almost regal in their splendour; they see themselves divinely anointed! I found all this very appealing and in some passages intoxicating.
However, these good things come at a cost. While the arrogance and religious fervour have their moments most of the time it’s just annoying, conceited nonsense. As with all religions, I find the need to express such certainty is laughable when compared to my own experience. Some might make an appeal to faith and perhaps that is what it boils down to. But why do most religions claim that they know everything when it is so blatantly obvious that humans know nothing? Oh, it may be lost, mystical knowledge, you say, which of course I couldn’t disprove any more than you could prove it! Humans are perennially groping about in the dark when it comes to the fundamental questions, in my opinion, and twas ever thus! Viewed from this perspective, most religions’ claims amount to crude advertising: Click here to understand the meaning of life and be eternally saved (watch out for fakes and frauds! Come to us for the one true religion, all others are wrong!!). Why do they all make such absurdly concrete claims when human experience is so decidedly uncertain? It all strikes me as tall tales to pacify the pretty terrifying reality that no one has even the slightest idea what is going on! I know such a pitiful amount about Buddhism, and perhaps the ideas in this book are an esoteric expression of this religion, but I struggled to see how everything could be nothingness and the void (an excellent and fascinating idea) but, nonetheless, Smith could be enthused about reaching nirvana through prayer or gaining some other kind of reward for is behaviour. Like the saved and the damned in Christianity, such a petty, decidedly human hierarchy seems to me to have nothing to do with the fundamental transcendental nature of the universe and everything to do with making silly, insecure, little humans feel special about themselves. Oh, look at me! I’m a special monk! Bah! Religions! Even if you ignore the philosophical inconsistencies, and my own philosophy is full of them so who am I to critcise, there was plenty more to annoy me!
The way Smith is always rattling on about Japan or China and Buddhist monks in a rambling and disjointed way is pretentious in the extreme. He is also very pleased with himself in describing his drunken exploits, sexual orgies, meditations, meals; pretty much everything in fact! Thankfully, this was leavened by a couple of incidents of humility and stories where he isn’t an absolute hero who is on the verge of saving the whole planet. Before I got to the first one of these I was thinking about abandoning the book just for it’s sheer self-satisfaction. The first incident was when he’s too scared to make it to the top of the mountain on the first hike with Japhy and the second is his stilted performance in the orgy although, even here, he intimates he got it sorted out in the end and then later on portrays himself as above sexual desire - a dubious assertion!!
Smith’s journey home was an interesting example of the duality I found in this book. Smith goes home and takes a lot of shit from his family for being unconventional and I felt sympathetic towards him. He is a searcher for higher meaning, an adventurer, albeit a pretentious one. His brother, especially, seems to find his Buddhism annoying and tests him about it. I suppose I would probably find his eccentricities annoying if I was his brother as we’re always looking for the worst in our siblings. If my brother got wasted all the time and started spouting off about meditation and eastern scholarship all the time, while interestingly never seeming to read anything apart from magazines, maybe I would get pissed off with him too. But at the same time, his desire to be amongst nature is harmless and I admired him for the originality of his thought. I felt he was somewhat harshly treated by his overly conventional family. Then all this sympathetic feeling was ruined by Smith’s ridiculous claim that he performed a miracle on his mother’s cough after having a vision in a dream! This sort of tosh reminded me of Paolo Coehlo’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ and that is in no way meant as a compliment. Sadly, this wasn’t the only pseudo-miraculous episode in the book and they’re all as ridiculous as each other. This passage is exemplary:
“During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilising physical opportunities to punish themselves because their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last ‘miracle’ because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.” (p125)
Other highlights of the genre include:
“A great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it’ll be guys like us that can start the thing.” (p170)
“We’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints.” (p175)
The fact remains that while passages like this make me deeply irritated it is probably this kind of thinking that contributes to the books more appealing points about spontaneity, philosophy and life. Smith, or Kerouac, or whoever is narrating is swept up in a wave of euphoria for his new ‘knowledge’ however fleeting or superficial it may be.
I imagine the prose style used in this book was considered sensational in the 1950s. It still felt original to me but not especially beautiful. It has a furious immediacy which I admired more for it’s philosophy than the actual final product of the style. He seems to be saying, ‘Come on! Now! Let’s write something! Anything! Let’s have some ideas! Let the universe flow through us! But we must act!’. I loved this idea and it made me sit down and write immediately, which I’m grateful for. In this sense, I wholeheartedly think of this as a good book. The prose itself was much more so-so. I felt it was pretty unclear, a bit jarring, confusing in places and was neither pleasant nor easy to read. Equally, it would be folly to say the author couldn’t write. There are occasional flashes of brilliance that make some of the slog worthwhile. It’s a bit like Nabokov but without the ornamentation upon adornment upon decoration; a minimalist, spontaneous, hobo Nabokov! Just now I have a vision of Kerouac as a hobo and Nabokov as a Tsarist era aristocrat - both with the same character: they talk incessantly and some of what they say is amazing and makes the most spectacular impression, in part because of their elaborate outfits and personalities, but the more time you spend with them the more you realise they talk a lot of rubbish besides and are really far too eager to impress upon you how clever and wonderful they are. They’re both too shouty in very different ways but with a surprisingly similar outcome. In the case of Nabokov, where I have read about four of his books, I feel better qualified to make this comment than with Kerouac where this is my first. A quick example of a passage I loved, the earlier quotations can serve as examples of what I didn’t like:
“Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it’s such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live’ and on this I’d go to sleep like a lamb. Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing IS nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?” (p199)
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have no idea of the background of this book or Kerouac further than to say it is set in the 1950s and, I think, was written then too. At some points I thought the whole thing was a sham and quite a poorly constructed one too. How could someone who hoboed around on the railways not have equipment like a sleeping bag or backpack? Why does he have to buy these when he meets up with Japhy? Money and food mysteriously appear out of nowhere and there are almost too many mundane reference to mundane places included in the text. Some parts felt more authentic than others but the narrative in general had the feel of a tall tale or, at least, a heavily embellished one! Some bits about Smith being a poet and his reference to being a young author made me think it might be autobiographical, although that’s a slippery concept when it comes to novels because, at some level, of course it is! How could it be otherwise?
This book has the infectious enthusiasm of someone who truly believes that they have discovered the key to life; with this comes unbearable arrogance and pretension! But the enthusiasm is sometimes a joy to behold and the book has some good ideas about spontaneity, communing with nature, self-sufficiency and being unconventional and a lot of half-baked rot too but thankfully it’s not that long! So all in all, this book had a couple of great ideas and a few great passages but was also irritating and a bit jarring to read at points. However, I definitely enjoyed the overall experience of reading it and would recommend it.
Let’s start with a paragraph on what you can know about this somewhat scattered narrative. Ray Smith, an older than college age man but probably no older than 40, used to be a ‘lionized’ young author but now lives as a ‘dharma bum’. He rolls around hitchhiking, jumping trains, getting drunk, fraternising with a literary bohemian crowd, thinks about Buddhism, writes poetry and prays. He seems to have been involved in an academic institution at one stage as he makes reference to his stipend or scholarship money. The prose and narrative rattle along in such an uneven and helter skelter way that it’s hard to recall every precise detail. In the course of the book, he goes to visit his friend / crush Japhy who appears to be an academic at Berkeley. I think Smith meets Japhy in the course of the book but becomes so infatuated with him and eulogises about him at such length it feels like he is a much older friend. Smith thinks Japhy is cooler than a polar bear's toenails and looks up to him as some kind of mentor or role model. The relentless commentary on just how great Japhy is could be read as repressed homoeroticism, especially when he talks about how Japhy is ‘a real man’, but, in the main, I just found it boring, a bit ridiculous and then faintly nauseating. Anyway, the pair pass a while together living in Japhy’s shack in a larger property’s garden and take a hike up a mountain before Smith goes hitchhiking home to visit his family. He returns, spends more time with Japhy, they take another hike, Japhy goes to Japan on some project or other. Smith goes to live on top of a mountain as a forest fire lookout in Washington state; a job that Japhy did the year before him but can’t repeat because of his Japanese voyage.
So what is there to like and dislike? Let’s start with the good stuff and finish off with some scathing criticisms! First, and most importantly, the idea of spontaneity and immediacy in writing. This was especially relevant to me as I am struggling to complete several longer book reviews while I was reading this book. The repeated appeals to these values struck a chord with me and made me feel that I may be guilty of overvaluing comprehensiveness and complexity in my reactions over authenticity and speed! As someone who is always going off on tangents, I felt like this was a really valuable point. Ordinarily, I would probably look up some things about the author and the places mentioned in the book before I start writing but I resolved to write something as soon after finishing as I could and I’m writing this no more than an hour or so after completing the book.
Something else I really loved and admired was the overflowing enthusiasm and love the author has for nature and the outdoors. His descriptions of the euphoria of being in nature and the sheer joy of hard physical exertion, a feeling of self-sufficiency, having minimal material things but being well equipped for your environment, freedom and independence are all spot on. He’s also brilliant in his acerbic reflections on society and mainstream life as he seems it, for example:
“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what?” (p166)
I also couldn’t help myself from liking his wild enthusiasm and belief in what he is doing. Simultaneously, the arrogance could be grating but the feelings it evoked were wonderful. A sort of, “who-gives-a-fuck, we know better than everyone and are experiencing things those idiots couldn’t even imagine”. Obnoxious stuff, to be sure, but also enchanting in the way they want to do something different, throw two fingers up at conventional knowledge and are totally committed to that cause. The self-belief and self-satisfaction are almost regal in their splendour; they see themselves divinely anointed! I found all this very appealing and in some passages intoxicating.
However, these good things come at a cost. While the arrogance and religious fervour have their moments most of the time it’s just annoying, conceited nonsense. As with all religions, I find the need to express such certainty is laughable when compared to my own experience. Some might make an appeal to faith and perhaps that is what it boils down to. But why do most religions claim that they know everything when it is so blatantly obvious that humans know nothing? Oh, it may be lost, mystical knowledge, you say, which of course I couldn’t disprove any more than you could prove it! Humans are perennially groping about in the dark when it comes to the fundamental questions, in my opinion, and twas ever thus! Viewed from this perspective, most religions’ claims amount to crude advertising: Click here to understand the meaning of life and be eternally saved (watch out for fakes and frauds! Come to us for the one true religion, all others are wrong!!). Why do they all make such absurdly concrete claims when human experience is so decidedly uncertain? It all strikes me as tall tales to pacify the pretty terrifying reality that no one has even the slightest idea what is going on! I know such a pitiful amount about Buddhism, and perhaps the ideas in this book are an esoteric expression of this religion, but I struggled to see how everything could be nothingness and the void (an excellent and fascinating idea) but, nonetheless, Smith could be enthused about reaching nirvana through prayer or gaining some other kind of reward for is behaviour. Like the saved and the damned in Christianity, such a petty, decidedly human hierarchy seems to me to have nothing to do with the fundamental transcendental nature of the universe and everything to do with making silly, insecure, little humans feel special about themselves. Oh, look at me! I’m a special monk! Bah! Religions! Even if you ignore the philosophical inconsistencies, and my own philosophy is full of them so who am I to critcise, there was plenty more to annoy me!
The way Smith is always rattling on about Japan or China and Buddhist monks in a rambling and disjointed way is pretentious in the extreme. He is also very pleased with himself in describing his drunken exploits, sexual orgies, meditations, meals; pretty much everything in fact! Thankfully, this was leavened by a couple of incidents of humility and stories where he isn’t an absolute hero who is on the verge of saving the whole planet. Before I got to the first one of these I was thinking about abandoning the book just for it’s sheer self-satisfaction. The first incident was when he’s too scared to make it to the top of the mountain on the first hike with Japhy and the second is his stilted performance in the orgy although, even here, he intimates he got it sorted out in the end and then later on portrays himself as above sexual desire - a dubious assertion!!
Smith’s journey home was an interesting example of the duality I found in this book. Smith goes home and takes a lot of shit from his family for being unconventional and I felt sympathetic towards him. He is a searcher for higher meaning, an adventurer, albeit a pretentious one. His brother, especially, seems to find his Buddhism annoying and tests him about it. I suppose I would probably find his eccentricities annoying if I was his brother as we’re always looking for the worst in our siblings. If my brother got wasted all the time and started spouting off about meditation and eastern scholarship all the time, while interestingly never seeming to read anything apart from magazines, maybe I would get pissed off with him too. But at the same time, his desire to be amongst nature is harmless and I admired him for the originality of his thought. I felt he was somewhat harshly treated by his overly conventional family. Then all this sympathetic feeling was ruined by Smith’s ridiculous claim that he performed a miracle on his mother’s cough after having a vision in a dream! This sort of tosh reminded me of Paolo Coehlo’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ and that is in no way meant as a compliment. Sadly, this wasn’t the only pseudo-miraculous episode in the book and they’re all as ridiculous as each other. This passage is exemplary:
“During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilising physical opportunities to punish themselves because their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last ‘miracle’ because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.” (p125)
Other highlights of the genre include:
“A great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it’ll be guys like us that can start the thing.” (p170)
“We’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints.” (p175)
The fact remains that while passages like this make me deeply irritated it is probably this kind of thinking that contributes to the books more appealing points about spontaneity, philosophy and life. Smith, or Kerouac, or whoever is narrating is swept up in a wave of euphoria for his new ‘knowledge’ however fleeting or superficial it may be.
I imagine the prose style used in this book was considered sensational in the 1950s. It still felt original to me but not especially beautiful. It has a furious immediacy which I admired more for it’s philosophy than the actual final product of the style. He seems to be saying, ‘Come on! Now! Let’s write something! Anything! Let’s have some ideas! Let the universe flow through us! But we must act!’. I loved this idea and it made me sit down and write immediately, which I’m grateful for. In this sense, I wholeheartedly think of this as a good book. The prose itself was much more so-so. I felt it was pretty unclear, a bit jarring, confusing in places and was neither pleasant nor easy to read. Equally, it would be folly to say the author couldn’t write. There are occasional flashes of brilliance that make some of the slog worthwhile. It’s a bit like Nabokov but without the ornamentation upon adornment upon decoration; a minimalist, spontaneous, hobo Nabokov! Just now I have a vision of Kerouac as a hobo and Nabokov as a Tsarist era aristocrat - both with the same character: they talk incessantly and some of what they say is amazing and makes the most spectacular impression, in part because of their elaborate outfits and personalities, but the more time you spend with them the more you realise they talk a lot of rubbish besides and are really far too eager to impress upon you how clever and wonderful they are. They’re both too shouty in very different ways but with a surprisingly similar outcome. In the case of Nabokov, where I have read about four of his books, I feel better qualified to make this comment than with Kerouac where this is my first. A quick example of a passage I loved, the earlier quotations can serve as examples of what I didn’t like:
“Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it’s such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live’ and on this I’d go to sleep like a lamb. Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing IS nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?” (p199)
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have no idea of the background of this book or Kerouac further than to say it is set in the 1950s and, I think, was written then too. At some points I thought the whole thing was a sham and quite a poorly constructed one too. How could someone who hoboed around on the railways not have equipment like a sleeping bag or backpack? Why does he have to buy these when he meets up with Japhy? Money and food mysteriously appear out of nowhere and there are almost too many mundane reference to mundane places included in the text. Some parts felt more authentic than others but the narrative in general had the feel of a tall tale or, at least, a heavily embellished one! Some bits about Smith being a poet and his reference to being a young author made me think it might be autobiographical, although that’s a slippery concept when it comes to novels because, at some level, of course it is! How could it be otherwise?
This book has the infectious enthusiasm of someone who truly believes that they have discovered the key to life; with this comes unbearable arrogance and pretension! But the enthusiasm is sometimes a joy to behold and the book has some good ideas about spontaneity, communing with nature, self-sufficiency and being unconventional and a lot of half-baked rot too but thankfully it’s not that long! So all in all, this book had a couple of great ideas and a few great passages but was also irritating and a bit jarring to read at points. However, I definitely enjoyed the overall experience of reading it and would recommend it.
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