The Lower Middle Road

I've started picking out books that seem especially suitable for reading on the Metro. For my current selection, I finally got around to reading Kerouac's On The Road. I don't know what I expected.  Perhaps memorable prose. I am probably too old for it, but then again I don't think I was in the proper frame of mind at any point in my life. I am not really one to drive into the night without a destination; I cherish order and foresight even in the absence of rational thought. Still, it made me nostalgic for all of the people I knew in high school, or working at ski resorts, who tried to live the life of On the Road.  Nowadays, if they are lucky, they probably all have to keep steady jobs and take showers and date people for long periods of time, but it had to be fun while it lasted. There is nostalgia, too, for an era I never knew first-hand, when WWII had just ended and many dust bowl families still picked cotton all day in California, having not yet heard the news that the Depression was over. An anachronistic shadow lies over countless throwaway details, like when they sit "under a big elm tree" (when elm trees still existed), or when he rides a bus through Iowa and approaches "the smoke of Des Moines." (No smoke anymore, just clean and quiet insurance companies.) Or when they go to wild and crazy parties in New York and "there was even a Chinese girl there."

Whatever else might be said about its influence on the culture as we know it today, I would note that it is also a predecessor for many other books by sensitive young white men. It reminds me of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (a much better book, which I recommend without reservation).