Jack Kerouac, �Maggie Cassidy�
Kerouac was one of those authors I ignored for a long time, simply because you hear him talked about all the time. I remember reading three quarters of On the Road when I was around 19 years old, and at first I was pleased to find my first literary character named Dean, but then he turned out to be such a goddamn hippie I was annoyed with him. I was enjoying the book, but we were at a cabin in Clear Lake and we left before I could finish the book. I didn�t think about Kerouac for a long time after that. Then I got the job in the bookstore. I didn�t have such a huge pile waiting to be read, so on a whim I picked up Satori in Paris.
On page 78 of the book, I wrote this at the end of a chapter: �I almost hate to say it, since he gets such high praise and has such status, but this is really good. Not deep, but really good.�
And so I started picking up every Kerouac book that came into the store. I read Lonesome Traveler, The Subterraneans, finally finished reading On the Road, and The Dharma Bums. And they were really not very good at all, particularly the first two. After he became successful and started to drink himself to death, Kerouac really just started babbling, because anything he wrote was considered gold. He meandered all over the place, making up words and digressing into bebop terminology, and the entire books were a mess. Suddenly I had seven other Kerouac books to read, and I was reluctant to touch any of them.
Luckily, this wasn�t like that. In a fairly standard tale of a first girlfriend, thinly veiled as fiction, Jack talks about meeting Maggie Cassidy and falling hard, even though he was only 16 and didn�t know what to do with his thingy yet, although Maggie hints that she knows. (He was also hindered by not having access to Amanda�s couch.) The story moves fairly quickly, and it�s cute, sad, and amusing all at the same time. But the best part has to be at the very end, when Jack makes one last try to get down her pants. That was the only time that I laughed out loud.
I�m telling you, it�s all about having Amanda�s couch. Wanna know why? Because I lost out on five hours of reading today while I was having sex on it, though not with Amanda. Yowza!
