This worries me.
I go back and forth on Kerouac. One day he's my favorite author and the next day the thought of him annoys me.
By any conventional standard, Kerouac is a terrible writer. His sentence construction is awkward and halting, and at times borders on being grammatically incorrect. And the two books of his I've read (On The Road and The Dharma Bums) have had incredibly anti-climactic endings that seem to peter out when Kerouac decided he didn't have anything else to write about.
On the other hand, Kerouac puts excitement about life and adventure onto page better than anyone I've ever read. He seemed to derive so much joy from his experiences. The simplest things that, if you thought about them yourself, would seem so mundane, seem so incredibly exciting and, well, awesome when Kerouac writes about them. If you ever get a chance to read On the Road, and I suggest you do. Wait until Kerouac described a bebop jazz club. You'll never feel the same way about it again. I'd quote it, but I don't own a copy of the book right now. I suppose you'll have to see for yourself.
Point being, what I like about Kerouac's work is the zest and wonder and excitement about life he puts onto page. It's incredible, really. But as far as prose and story structure go, he's not my favorite.
That's why Big Sur worries me. If it's going to be a depressing, ho-drum account the whole way through, it'll take away the one aspect of Kerouac's work I really like. I'm still gunna give it a shot, but for now, I'm a skeptic.
But, as I said before, On the Road is totally worth reading for Kerouac's take on life and the excitement come through onto page. It could change the way you think. It did for me.
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