Books Editor Scott Eyman on
On the Road* at 50 years of age:

Stylistically, what Kerouac was doing - whether intentionally or not - was shifting the component part of the American novel as he understood it from the individual sentence to the overall emotional impact. In point of fact, there are very few sentences in On the Road that could be pointed out as well-formed or beautiful, which is undoubtedly what Capote and a lot of critics found objectionable.

Every once in a while, Kerouac rises to the occasion: "On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls - bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice."

But the book matchlessly captures a time and people occupying themselves with frenetic trips back and forth across America, in perpetual pursuit of sex, beauty, jazz and drugs. Or, to put it another way, life.

It's a culturally inclusive novel - you can hear bongos and Brubeck and Miles Davis in some of it, but other times, notably the ending, it's pure Joyce: "the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

Yes, she said, yes, yes.

That's the case for the defense.

The prosecution might argue that On the Road prefigures a particular kind of writing that's proliferated since the computer became the instrument of choice rather than the pencil or the typewriter - that shapeless, never-ending slop that makes you want to break Dave Eggers' fingers, and that was much harder to accomplish when writing was a form of manual labor.

But after 50 years, it's clear that Kerouac has triumphed. Despite the deceptive façade of logorrhea, he's actually very focused and perpetually modern in his desire for something more than what he's already got. He's a weird prefiguring of a one-of-a-kind shape-shifting blogger, constantly taking the emotional temperature of the room and breathlessly reporting on it.

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* 50 years since the 9/5/57 publication,
but the writing was complete by early 1951.

Which makes it even fresher in capturing the immediate post-War restlessness. The phrase is cheapened these days but really, Read the Whole Thing.