Desolation Angels

I had some concerns when I started this book. Concerns such as, “Am I too old for Kerouac? Is all this poet-hipster adventuring sort of pretentious?” So I was surprised by the deep current of melancholy that runs through the book. Jack Duluoz (Kerouac's alter-ego) certainly has his share of adventures in the poet-artist scene, but there's also a real sense of the madness and precariousness of the scene.

The story starts of with Duluoz' time spent as a fire lookout in the Skagit Valley national park. The solitude and melancholy is in some ways at its strongest here, with no drugs or companionship to take the edge off of it.

Duluoz then hithchikes and rides his way back to San Francisco to spend time with the Beats there. Here we meet his regular crew, including the Ginsberg stand-in Irwin Allen, who comes off as a fascinating figure.

One gets the sense of the ferment of the social scene, of how the desire to create and to challenge social norms led to experimenting with art and notions of the self. From here, Duluoz and friends head to Mexico, then Morocco, Europe and back to America.

I wouldn't describe Kerouac's style as my favorite, but it does a good job of capturing the feel of the era and his own spiritual hunger. Kerouac, in fact, seems already somewhat jaded by the reaction to One the Road, frustrated by the empty hipster pose it seems to have inmspired among many.

So, if I had to sum it up, a fascinating narrative of spiritual hunger and frustration, of social ferment and an era when one world of post-WWII conformity was about to break apart.