I read Kerouac’s On the Road when I was 16 or so, mostly while I was crammed onto the top bed of a three-tier bunk on a train traveling across northern France. It was as idyllic as it sounds, and the experience was galvanizing to my nascent wanderlust. The lifestyle of the Beatniks was romantic, something to dedicate myself towards. It was a way of life that, to my tangled up wires of fucked up teenage psychology, seemed wholly misunderstood by everybody but me because of how unique and bold it was. I don’t think the book resonated with me because I was naturally unique and bold, but because I wanted to be unique and bold.
Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise appealed to me, although I doubt my 16-year-old self would have been able to exactly articulate why. If I were asked to elaborate as to why (I’m not sure anyone ever did challenge me on this), I think I probably would’ve reached for the off-brand box of answers and used words like “free” and “do what they want” and “romantic.” The Beatnik culture was certainly counter to everything in my experience up to this point in my life, and revealed the possibility of a life driven by a lust for experience and zero accountability. What could be more ideal for a teenage boy who, thus far, hadn’t even held his first job?
Being unique and hard to grasp, that was what made you alluring and worth knowing. You didn’t have to try to meet people if you fit this mold, didn’t have to worry about fitting in, didn’t feel anxious around strangers. Rather, people would come to you because they needed to know you. People would not be able to avoid orbiting you because the gravitational pull of you-as-curiosity was simply too powerful.
Revisiting Kerouac almost 20 years later, the determination of a teen boy trying to Be Like Jack can’t help but drown in its own conceit. I was the prime audience for On the Road: young, entitled, a landfill of emotions, and male. However, the most painfully clear yet still embarrassing fact about books like On the Road is that, sure, it lays out a lesson plan for how to make yourself interesting, but it’s only instructive of how to be interesting to yourself. To other people, not so much. In fact, On the Road is a how-to for making yourself insufferable to other people.
Reading Without Men 