Book of Sketches
Word Sketches
Jack Kerouac
Penguin: New York, NY, 414 pages

Reviewed by Rob Woodard

Jack Kerouac, as anyone even slightly interested in American literature knows, is the most visible, and arguably most important, writer to emerge from the literary/cultural movement known as Beat, which exploded into mainstream American consciousness in the late 1950s with the publication of his novel ON THE ROAD and his compatriot Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.”

While many a hostile critic over the years has tried to dismiss him as a period writer or more of a cultural phenomena than a true literary force, Kerouac’s work has continued to find new large audiences with each generation before and since his death, and in the last two decades or so he has even slowly begun to be canonized by an American literary establishment, which is finally beginning to admit the originality, quality, and profound social impact of his work. Kerouac’s popularity and importance, along with the fact that he was an amazingly prolific writer, has led to the publication of many posthumous works, which not surprisingly, have been quite uneven in quality, ranging from the truly brilliant and necessary to the negligible and slightly embarrassing. Given this situation, it is most definitely appropriate to be skeptical of any “new” Kerouac book coming out at such a late date. Which is what makes the emergence of BOOK OF SKETCHES such a wonderful, unexpected, and important surprise.

Written mostly between the years 1952 and 1954, BOOK OF SKETCHES is pretty much what its title implies: a series of word-sketches of what Kerouac is seeing, thinking, feeling, and generally experiencing at any given time. Written in small notebooks, which he so famously carried in his breast pocket, these sketches take the form of a kind of jagged verse (though on the book’s opening page Kerouac explicitly rejects this term) that mostly hovers somewhere between poetry and an odd sort of elastic prose, which overall has the feel of that more impressionist sections of his best novels. This very open form, and the fact that Kerouac is simply sketching the moment as opposed to trying to structure a formal story, leaves him a great deal of freedom to filter thru numerous topics and states of mind. For those acquainted with Kerouac’s work the subject matter will be very familiar, with explorations of America and its meaning, Buddhism and eastern thought in general, Mexico, jazz, the role of the writer, loneliness, and the wandering lifestyle dominate throughout. This is not to say that this book is a rehash of other works. Actually, it is quite the opposite: one of the most amazing things about this work is its freshness. This most likely is because the years in which these sketches were written were the ones in which Kerouac was at the absolute peak of his abilities, while he was also making the major breakthroughs in his philosophy of “spontaneous prose,” which Kerouac’s codifies wonderfully in this work:

Unbroken word sketches
of the subconscious pictures
of sections of the
memory life of an
imbecile genius resting
in the madhouse of his
mind-The word
flow must not be disturbed,
or picture forgotten for
words’ sakes, nor the
pictures stretched beyond
their bookmovie strength
except parenthetically (pages 258-259)

Driven by this attitude, BOOK OF SKETCHES takes us on a four hundred-plus page whirlwind journey thru such typical Kerouac haunts as Lowell, Massachusetts, New York City, Denver, Mexico City, San Francisco, and lesser known locales including rural North Carolina and the central California farming hub of Watsonville, all of which are described from the classic Kerouac sad-beautiful point of view. Less typical is the scathing criticism Kerouac levels at the country he so obviously loves and the lifestyles of its inhabitants. Jack Kerouac is perhaps the most compassionate and forgiving of all American writers. While his novels, poems, and other works do contain their share of anger directed towards what he sees as the follies of this nation, this anger is usually muted by the basic awe the man feels towards the American experiment and creation in general. In BOOK OF SKETCHES, though, this anger is more often left bare, allowing Kerouac’s contempt for the wealthy, the business class, and bourgeois middle-class values to come thru quite strongly. “-Gad I hate/ American with a passionate intensity,” he writes, in what is probably the book most angry passage. “It aint no atom/ bomb will blow up/ America, America itself is a bomb/ bound to go off/ from within” (page 148). Jack Kerouac’s America is a place of great beauty, wonder, and courage-but it is also a place that is destroying itself with foolish consumerism, pointless “progress,” and its profound neglect of its spiritual core. For him, the middle-class values that drive America are a nightmare to be escaped, which he does, by turning to what he sees as our society’s more fundamental inhabitants, such as poor blacks, even poorer Indians and Mexicans (in Kerouac’s vision Mexico is really just another aspect of “America”), artists and wanderers of all stripes, and most importantly the land itself, the disappearing “Railroad Earth,” a mythic America that cannot be contained in books or even minds, but can only be lived, breathed as overall experience, as the promise of freedom and truthfulness that is fundamentally the American dream.

And it is these aspects of BOOK OF SKETCHES that make it such an important work. Though the landscape has changed much physically since Kerouac wandered the land, the same values of “progress” and spiritual degradation still rule America and continue to destroy its soul. In his examination of this reality from the perspective of a different time, Kerouac has left us an invaluable blueprint of our own struggles, an engaging time capsule of this place and people, which shows us not only where we’ve been, but where we seem to be heading, and perhaps, for those listening very carefully, ways to stem this destruction.

Rob Woodard is the author of the novels Heaping Stones and What Love Is. He is also the editor of the Burning Shore Review. He currently lives in Long Beach, California. He can be reached thru the “Contact” page of this website.