If you read nothing else this week...

From time to time, I fancy myself as a bit of a writer. The hubris quickly passes as I flounder at the end of the first paragraph but the desire still remains. What desire you may ask (or more likely not)? It is my burning ambition to write a novel that will have the same effect on my hypothetical readers that On The Road had on me.

I first read it in the summer of 2009. It electrified me. It blew my mind. It literally caused a change in the way that I think, the way that I behave and in my attitude to life in general. It isn't only the content of the story, to which I will return, it is the style of writing that affected me so intensely. Jack Kerouac writes with a fluidity and energy that quickly reduces you to a trance-like state of frenzied reading; each sentence is consumed with great haste and growing hunger. That mastery of the 'stream of consciousness' style, of which Truman Capote short-sightedly dismissed as typing, not writing, is what begins to slowly re-wire your brain. The great speed by which Kerouac moves from thought to thought, observation to observation, had a lasting impact on me. Fickleness is one word for the result but I prefer, as inevitably my ego would force me to, the phrase 'carefree enthusiasm'.

And that is before we have even mentioned the story! The crux is that the narrator Sal Paradise chases his beautiful band of Beat mystics across the United States time and again, in search of jazz, women, whiskey and 'it'. The elusive 'it' which embodies those fleeting moments of joy and immortality. They drive for hours and days across the great American plains, picking up hitchhikers to pay for the gas, always searching for something new to light up their eyes and raise up their souls.

Ah see, now I've got completely over-excited about the whole thing (well it is my favourite, after all). Let me put the book in its proper context. Jack Kerouac was a published author, but hardly 'huge', living in New York in the 50s. He, and his friends who included Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, were the original ëBeatsí. While he certainly had been thinking about the story, much of it autobiographical, and preparing it for a number of years, he eventually typed the entire thing in only three weeks, working almost non-stop with a continuous 120-foot roll of paper; he believed that having to change the paper on his typewriter would interrupt his natural flow of thought.

The result of that arduous effort is quite simply, a classic. It has its detractors, I find that women are less enthusiastic about it than men, but in the words of Bob Dylan: "[On the Road] changed my life like it changed everyone else's". Amen.