The Panopticon by Janni Fagan

You have to do the first things first--you have to begin at the beginning. This is the last time, I will never do this again. Begin at the beginning, pick a birth. You have tae do it like it is important, like it counts.

Anais Hendricks doesn’t belong anywhere. An orphan who’s spent her whole life being shuffled from foster home to foster home, she doesn’t even know her real name, let alone her real parents, and, when The Panopticon opens, she’s on the way to the titular institution, a sort of asylum/juvvie hybrid, accused of putting a police officer into a coma.

Not one to play the victim, Anais makes no particular effort to get her readers on her side--she is who she is, sex, drugs, bad attitude and all, from the first page. Thing is, Anais and her companions at The Panopticon feel like real, fleshed-out people, not marionettes. There are no out-of-character moments of sentimentality, no “I had a messed up childhood” confessions, but by the time the story ended, I was genuinely horrified and moved by the stories of these poor, lost souls looking for peace. Particularly moving was the relationship between Tash and Shortie, a terminal cutter and a “tough girl”, culminating in (MINOR SPOILERS) an impromptu wedding on a boat outing.

I keep coming back to the characters because this is a story about people, not about plot. Although Jenni Fagan, in her debut(!) novel, keeps things moving and even manages to deliver a couple gut-punches, the people are the real narrative, their stories, some of which go largely untold, some of which end sadly, but all of which feel achingly real.

I feel like, in some ways, The Panopticon made me a little better person--less prone to judge, more empathetic. It opened my eyes to a world I wasn't familiar with in a way that only novels really can. I recommend it without reservation, allowing that it gets pretty gritty and intense, to anyone who cares about people, and the forces that make them who they are. Or, if they just like a good story, well-told.

An admission, and an apology: Admission first: I really loved The Panopticon. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year and one of the best first novels I’ve ever read. Now the apology: I finished it and then circumstances kept me from writing my review while it was still fresh on my mind. Any shortcomings in this review are a result of that delay.

White Out by Michael W. Clune

"Wishes begin in white. Jesus is white Madonna is white. The queen is white. The moon is white. The white tops are white. A picture starts out as a white space. A white space is a picture of the future. The future poses, the camera snaps, the picture is pure white. In Baltimore that summer the best heroin was sold in little glass vials with white stoppers. White tops."

White Out is a memoir about drug addiction, specifically heroin. In the first chapter, "Memory Disease," Clune describes the strong grip heroin had on him and its deleterious effects. But he does so through conversations, gritty characters, and grim scenes.

Throughout the book, it is rare that Clune's writing is overtly didactic. He chooses rather to rely on the reader to draw conclusions from the stories he presents. That's really what they are: stories. Because while White Out is a memoir, it reads like a novel. At numerous points, I was reminded of scenes from HBO's The Wire, which was also set in Baltimore. The people Clune introduces the reader to seem almost too tragic to be real: Henry who lost an arm after passing out on top of it in a heroin-induced sleep; the people trying to get clean that he meets at various clinics; and Clune himself, perhaps the most tragic.

Clune eventually gets clean. I imagine it would be impossible to write a publishable book while addicted to heroin. He credits his sobriety to "the machine"--to the habits he formed in the early days of his recovery. Habits like meditation, going to NA meetings, and making lists for himself. But besides making to-do lists each night for the following day, Clune says he does not think about the future. The future, in all of it whiteness.

The Wonder Bread Summer by Jessica Anya Blau

"As the silver Honda slipped into the never-ending weave of cars, Allie turned and saw Jonas, naked except for his socks, running toward her." I paused after I read that sentence. I wasn't using a piece of scratch paper as a bookmark as I usually do, and I got up to get a pen and paper to make sure I didn't forget about it. It contains all the major themes of The Wonder Bread Summer--cars, questionable choices, frenetic-paced action, and weird sexual interactions. It implies that the protagonist is the girl--probably a young girl, her name is Allie, and that she is being pursued. If you were to distill Wonder Bread down to one sentence, it would essentially be this sentence.

Wonder Bread takes off like a rocket with the very first page [questionable choice] [weird sexual interaction]. For the next 259 pages, Allie is on the run [cars] and doing all that she can to stay alive [frenetic-paced action]. In her quest to continue living, Allie reunites with her aging-groupie mother, grows a little closer to her father, and even has sex with a punk rock star [questionable choice]. Wonder Bread really doesn't let up until the last page.

My fiance read Wonder Bread before I did, and said she wasn't sure that I would like it. She said that it reminded her of the steamrolling adventures that Carl Hiaasen writes. I have never read anything written by Carl Hiaasen, but my fiance assures me that the comparison is apt, so I thought I would pass it on. Despite my fiance's doubts, I really enjoyed this book. Wonder Bread was a fun, well-paced romp along the West Coast of 1983.

The cover Wonder Bread does it no favors. It conveys none of the absurdity present on nearly every page of this, Jessica Anya Blau's third novel. A book with a back-flap synopsis that describes it as being "loosely based on Alice in Wonderland" needs cover art that conveys the same.

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Three classes behind his, Peggy Gring had gone to high school with Rabbit and had seen him when he was good, had say in those hot bleachers screaming, when he was a hero, naked and swift and lean. She has seen him come to nothing.

I read, but didn’t review, Rabbit, Run, last year. It follows Rabbit Angstrom, aged 26, as he lives his post-high school life, tries, and fails, to make his marriage to his high school sweetheart work, and suffers some pretty heavy-duty heartbreak. It’s a tragic book, and Rabbit is a tragic character, both unique and universal—he’s his own man, but the narrative of Rabbit, Run is a universal chronicle of one man’s failure to live up to whatever potential he has. It’s also an exercise in both character and reader debasement, disturbing and moving in equal part.

Rabbit Redux takes place 10 years later, with much of the cast returning, picking up where Run left off, with Rabbit, in the aftermath of the tragic event that closes Run, trying—and once again, failing—to shape his life into something that makes him less miserable. After discovering his wife is having an affair with a co-worker, George Stavros, Rabbit’s life again goes off the rails. His wife leaves him, and he takes in a young female runaway, Jill, and her “friend”, a black drug dealer named Skeeter. Things don’t go well.

The title. Rabbit Redux, speaks to a restoration, and, in the end, there is a restoration of sorts. It comes at a cost, of course, and most of Redux doesn’t seem redemptive at all. If anything, Rabbit is a bigger jerk than in Run, more confused, volatile, misogynist, and, adding a new wrinkle, racist. He descends into drug use and, regarding Jill, what could easily be construed as sexual abuse, and, frankly, is pretty reprehensible. It speaks to Updike’s skill that Rabbit still feels human and, in the end, pitiful, if not exactly sympathetic.

Parts of Redux are hard reading—the bleakness rarely lets up, and there’s a dearth of reader surrogates. Updike dares us to sympathize with Rabbit, the cruel screw-up, as he watches those around him collapse. And watch, he does; Rabbit’s defining characteristic is his passivity, his impotence. He is acted upon and around. Even in his seductions, which in Run were at least initiated by Angstrom himself, are thrust upon him by others. He allows terrible things to happen under his roof, allows his wife to leave when she all but tells him she wants him to fight for her, lets his son do as he pleases. In the end, even Rabbit’s redemption, such as it is, is a sad, passive affair, as he is restored, not by his own actions, but by the actions of a woman he has wronged.

In the end, the title ends up being a cruel irony: Rabbit’s restoration at the end of the novel only restores him to less than the state he was in at the beginning. He is renewed only in the sense that his situation has changed, for the worse—the man in the middle is the same as always, growing older as the world revolves around him. Rabbit stifles every attempt at epiphany, never striving to be a better man, drowning in his own confusion and pity, kept from the deepest depths by the outstretched hands of the people he hurts.

One more thing: I don’t know if it comes through in this review, but Rabbit Redux is a very strange, very adult book. It’s disturbing, creepy, and can be kind of disgusting. Let the buyer beware.

Tweak by Nic Sheff

I'd been sober exactly eighteen months on April 1st, just two days ago. I'd made so much progress. My life was suddenly working, you know? I had a steady job at a rehab in Malibu. I'd gotten back all these things I'd lost - car, apartment, my relationship with my family. It'd seemed like, after countless rehabs and sober livings, I had finally beaten my drug problem. And yet there I was, standing on Haight Street, drunk on Stoli and stoned on Ambien, which I'd stolen from the med room at that rehab.

Honestly, I was as surprised by my own actions as anyone else.

"Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines" is author Nic Sheff's memoirs of his last two relapses into drug abuse. Nic is the son of David Sheff, the "Beautiful Boy" in the title of the elder Sheff's own memoir. When I reviewed that book, I mentioned that I planned on reading Nic's version of the events. I'm glad I did, but I'm happy that I waited a few weeks, rather than read the two books as the companion volumes that so many critics are making them out to be.

Tweak starts with the first of Nic's most recent relapses. Nic doesn't spend a lot of time ruminating on the whys of each relapse episode. He doesn't really get very introspective until the end of the book, when a dual diagnosis (mental illness and addiction) rehab center helps him get to the root of the psychological basis for his addictions. For most of the book, Nic just details the horrors of his present, and even the relative bleakness of his year of sobriety in between his two latest relapses.

One thing I found interesting was Nic's pervasive feelings of worthlessness and his need to use others for his own self-validation. He particularly falls into this with his relationships. Each of Nic's relapses coincides with a relationship. In the first, he meets up with and dates old friend and recovering addict Lauren only after his relapse, causing her to relapse as well. The two spend a drug fueled month holed up in her parents' home why they are away, alternately shooting up mixtures of meth and heroin or having sex. It takes getting away from Lauren for Nic to achieve sobriety after that month, only after stealing from parents' and friends' homes and dealing meth with a street kid named Gack for money. Although Nic and Lauren profess to love one another, Nic notes that he has never spent time with Lauren sober. This relationship and relapse seem minor compared with the second Nic details.

While sober, Nic is consumed by feelings of depression, mania, and worthlessness. He writes about considering going back to Lauren, reasoning, "I know she had problems, but at least I had a girlfriend. So far I haven't met anyone that I could possibly have a relationship with. That is a big thing for me. I've always felt sort of worthless if I didn't have a girlfriend."

Throughout the book, Nic writes about episodes of his life from when he was younger, or from other relapses. He describes letting gay men have sex with him for money to buy drugs, and stealing cancer medication and needles from his girlfriend's mom's house to get high. He describes his "unconventional" childhood, being toted around with his single dad to movie previews, parties and around San Francisco. He describes being a little boy and running into his dad's bedroom one morning to find a naked woman in bed too. This was the late 1980s in San Francisco and precocious Nic's first worry is that his dad will catch AIDs. It is only after his dad shows him with a condom and a banana how he is protecting himself that Nic feels better. Nic writes that, "My dad used to tell that story to his friends like it was really funny and cool," subtly digging at his unsheltered upbringing.

The second half of Tweak is dominated by Nic's latest relapse, spurred in part by his relationship with Zelda, the love of his life. Zelda ("Z" from Beautiful Boy) is 15 years older than Nic, divorced and Hollywood royalty. Nic feels validated just by being with her and their friends, a group of writers, actors and other Hollywood elite. He is so defined by these relationships that at his last rehab, he is put on a "no name-dropping" contract so he can no longer use his connections to brag. Zelda is pretty damaged, the product of many failed relationships and a drug addicted mother who committed suicide by hanging herself.

Nic and Zelda become completely codependent on one another and the book becomes a twisted drug-addled love story towards the end. They find themselves getting engaged while high one night, selling their possessions for drug money, and fighting constantly while strung out and psychotic from meth, Suboxone, heroin, coke, crack, benzos (it's a product of my sheltered upbringing that I don't even know what those are...Nic doesn't elaborate), and various other prescription drugs. Nic finally bottoms out when he gets stuck in a psychotic break in his own mother's garage while trying to break into her house and steal a computer. His parents offer him a last chance: rehab or they press charges and he goes to jail.

Nic reluctantly chooses rehab, and in the process learns more about his underlying need for validation, his connections between sex and self-validation, his underlying diagnosis of bipolar disorder and his tendencies towards codependent relationships. He writes in Tweak's final chapters that he is finally listening to his feelings and beginning to grieve for the time he has lost and the experiences he has put himself through. The book ends on a hopeful note, despite his parents' reluctance to fully believe in his sobriety, having been through rehab so often with him.

Nic's story was more critical of his parents and upbringing than I would have thought going into it. He describes his ruined relationship with stepmother Karen and his dislike of his stepfather Todd, who he doesn't feel treats his mom well. He describes his dad as his best friend and hero in one breath and denounces his over exposed childhood in another. He writes that the long distance dual-custody arrangement put him directly in the middle of his parents' bickering and that they constantly subjected him to their tirades against one another. At the same time, he recognizes that what he has put his parents through during his relapses far surpasses any anger he feels towards them.

This was a very graphic book, typical of the addiction and recovery memoirs I've read, both YA and adult (Go Ask Alice, Smack, Million Little Pieces). Nic spares no detail in describing his drug-fueled marathon sex with Lauren and Zelda; an orgy he participated in as a sex worker; a festering wound from a dirty needle that abscessed and nearly caused him to lose his arm; the struggle to find a vein that hasn't collapsed in the middle of his relapses. It's definitely an interesting and quick read. I'm glad I read it, because David Sheff presents himself as a bit of a martyr in "Beautiful Boy." Tweak allows us to see the struggle on the other side. I'm not excusing anything Nic does (he doesn't ask readers to), but it is interesting to read about the influences Nic was exposed to growing up.

Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out," he said. "I worship the people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy."

The living and the healthy.

I do not know if my son can be one of them.


The full title of David Sheff's memoir is "Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction." It's a pretty awesome book, and unusual because I haven't read a book about addiction from the view of a parent before this. There are a lot of former-addict memoirs out there (James Frey, Anthony Kiedis, the anonymous author of "Go Ask Alice") and while poignant and touching, the genre is starting to feel a bit tired. I think my disillusionment started with the whole "A Million Little Pieces" debacle (Oprah said she felt "really duped." Me too Oprah. Me too.)

Anyway, back to Beautiful Boy. Call me voyeuristic, but I enjoy memoirs and biographies (even fake ones; see my review of "American Wife") above all other forms of literature. I also really like the A&E show "Intervention." Put those two things together and you have this book. I knew I was going to like it and I did. What surprised me was the quality of the writing. This wasn't some random parent struggling to give his son's disease justice. This was a writer struggling to give his son's disease justice. Sheff was distinguished for his writing career before this best-seller's release. He had the privilege of writing one of the last interviews with John Lennon, when he asked the musician the question above.

Beautiful Boy is a story about addiction, but Sheff didn't want that to be his son's entire story. So he starts at the beginning of Nic's life, and spins a tale of a precocious, creative, adorable child growing up in Northern California amid the chaos of his parents' divorce and an imperfect joint custody agreement that spans several hundred miles. Nic seems like a pretty terrific kid all the way up through high school. He shares a special relationship with his dad, and welcomes a new stepmom and, in time, baby siblings. All the while, Sheff paints a portrait of an extraordinarily sensitive and caring child.

Nic is a friend to everyone. He experiments with alcohol and pot at an early age but after some initial concern, his dad dismisses the incidents as normal teenage experimentation. Sheff himself had a colorful adolescence with regard to drugs, so he is inclined to be forgiving. Later, his openness with Nic about his past will be one of the many things Sheff blames himself for.

It is not until Nic's senior year of high that his behavior and experimentation turn seriously harmful. While he does manage to graduate, Nic spends most of the year in a haze of smoke, and tries hard drugs for the first time the night of graduation. In college, Nic discovers meth, which he says is like finding something he's been looking for his whole life. "When I tried it for the first time, that was that," he says.

Nic's battle with drug and alcohol addiction, particularly to the pernicious methamphetamine, takes over the second half of Sheff's book. In and out of rehab, homeless on the streets, stealing from his own parents and grandparents, Nic is constantly attended by his addiction and his father's love. In the second half of Beautiful Boy, Sheff takes on a more introspective tone, as he turns inward to deal with what he calls his addiction to his son's addiction. Sheff realizes that he is so preoccupied with his son's disease that he's neglecting his wife, his other children and his own mental health. After a lot of family therapy, Al-Anon and his own life-threatening illness, Sheff ends the book on a cautiously optimistic note: Nic, despite several relapses, is sober for the time being.

I really appreciated the author's interesting writing style when reading this book. It kind of made me feel like I was drinking in this family's saga, rather than just reading words off a page. I'd confidently recommend this book to lit snobs just as often as story lovers like myself. Interestingly, Nic has written a YA memoir too, called "Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines." I haven't decided if I'm going to read Nic's memoir yet, but if I do, you'll see it on here.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several thoughts; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.

He had lain there -- a funny little fucker -- a little stingless quiver on the earth. That was all there was of him, and all there had ever been... He was the celebrated living dog, preferred over dead lions.

Sorry for the long excerpt, hope you made it through unscathed. I just think that it's a passage of great power and insight, and it encapsulates perfectly what this book is about: the dissolution of life as a moral force, the transformative effects of war, and incorrigible cowardice.

Dog Soldiers opens up on the mid-Seventies, pissing on the era's grave. As the Vietnam War fades into irrelevance, so does the Bohemian ideal that pressed against it, leaving behind a skeleton of impotence and junkieism. John Converse, a journalist languishing in boredom in Vietnam, decides to engineer the transit and sale of three kilos of heroin to the United States, asking his friend Merchant Marine Ray Hicks to courier it to his wife Marge in San Francisco. The deal comes under the eye of a murderous regulatory official who wants the heroin for himself, and sets off a lengthy chase in which Hicks runs off with Marge and the corrupt Feds force Converse to help them pursue the drugs.

I am reminded of the way Odysseus struggles with his return from Troy, having to leave behind the madness of war before he can be permitted to return home to Ithaca. In the same way Stone's America has descended into ruin as the Vietnam War has become irrelevant; Converse notes that things make much less sense in the States than they do in Vietnam. In a desperate attempt to sell off the heroin, Ray and Marge encounter a number of warped hippie sterotypes, like the spiritualist roshi who lives on a distant mountaintop who has long since entropied into being little more than a drug dealer. Even Ray himself, a devotee of Eastern philosophy, is deranged and murderous.

There is a big hole here for me, and that is why exactly the corrupt Feds want the heroin so badly that they spend such effort tracking down Marge and Hicks. I suppose that three kilos of heroin would go for quite a bit, but the effort--and the ruthlessness--seem out of proportion (This Slate article gives a pretty good picture of what it might be worth--$300,000-$525,000 in today's dollars). But then again, Dog Soldiers is about madness, and their pursuit is doggedly fanatical. Stone also has a tendency to write around immediate action and fuzzy up the plot, encouraging confusion in anything but the most careful reader, so I may have missed something.

Still, I must admit great affection for this book. The writing is aggressively brusque, and when it takes a step back from the action can show a lot of wisdom written plainly--like in the excerpt above. It's the kind of book I adore: eventful without being vapid, colorful without being quirky, visceral and suspenseful. Highly recommended.

In Search of Captain Zero by Allan Weisbecker

A friend of mine who doesn't read much more than he has to once turned down a night buffoonery and drunken revelry to stay home and finish reading this book. So, I decided to pick up a copy. Good call.

Here's the premise. Weisbecker's old friend and surfing buddy Chris, aka Captain Zero, deserts his old life in the States and heads somewhere into Central America, cutting off all contact with his family and friends. Something like five years later, Weisbecker loads up his trailer and sets off along the Pacific in search of him.

It's more than just an account of his journey, it's a memoir. He inserts little tales from his past with Christopher. He talks about living in Hawaii during the advent of the short board. He describes a few failed attempts at running drugs from South America, and talks about growing up fishing off the far end of Long Island. He lets his personal philosophy bleed into all of the stories, and he really draws you into his worldview. Above all, it's entertaining. You'll probably find yourself wanting to do something slightly illegal and adventurous when you're finished.

As a side note, I think Nathan met Captain Zero in Costa Rica. Apparently he owns a book store somewhere near Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean side.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is set in a future dystopia (1994), but it's very different from other dystopic literature I've read: instead of being concerned with a sweeping new vision of a future society, it's concerned with smaller, more personal issues. In it, a government agent named Fred is assigned to infiltrate the heirarchy of the drug world, and in his disguise as run-of-the-mill druggie Bob Arctor he becomes addicted to a mysterious drug known as Substance D.

The thing about Substance D, however, is that it dissolves the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres of your brain and can result in the development of two different personas. Because not even Fred's superior's are allowed to know his secret identity as Bob Arctor, Fred is assigned to spy on himself. At first what is a mildly comic result of Dick's police state becomes a bizarre scenario in which Fred and Bob separate, and neither realizes that they're the same person. The title is a reference to the Bible, which refers to seeing oneself "through a mirror darkly," as Fred/Bob surveys his own life through a "scanner," which is basically a glorified surveillance camera, unable to look upon himself completely.

Supposedly, writing this book was agonizing for Dick, who based much of it upon his own experiences as a drug addict. The dialogue in the book between Bob and his drug-buddies is both surreal and sincere, reflecting a genuine but skewed view on reality that wavers between comedy and tragedy. The destruction of Fred/Bob's mind is heartbreaking, and given extra force by the epilogue, in which Dick dedicates the book to all of his friends who died or were permanently damaged by drug use--including himself, listed with the rest, as having severe pancreatic damage due to his addictions.

This novel is probably the most stirring rejection of drug use that I've ever read. Somewhat peculiarly, the Times 100 Greatest Books of the 20th Century list only includes Ubik from Dick's extensive corpus, instead of one of his more popular novels like this one, The Man in the High Castle, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I can't imagine any of his books being more genuine or affecting than this one.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Sometimes I think Sal Paradise was right
Boys and girls in America
Have such a sad time together
--The Hold Steady, “Stuck Between Stations”

The way I felt about this book before reading it was pretty similar to the way I felt about Catcher in the Rye: It’s such a hallowed tome for so many people, especially college kids, that I was wary to sit down and read it. I’m suspicious of popular things; that’s who I am. With Catcher in the Rye I was rewarded with a book that exceeded all the expectations I had for it, with On the Road, my expectations were pretty much spot on.

On the Road is a story not about one road trip, but about several—I think there’s roughly four or five, each one corresponding to a different “book.” There’s something amazing and fascinating about it, the way that, in essence, it is a day-by-day account of three formative years in Kerouac’s life, compiled in copious notes and then written down in a “creative explosion” that took only three weeks. It’s hard to tell, but I’d guess that there’s more truth to it than fiction; all the characters in the book are people Kerouac knew. Kerouac himself is narrator Sal Paradise, but the focus of much of the book belongs to Dean Moriarty, the analogue of hipster-king Neal Cassady. It’s the whims of Moriarty, who is a fickle, half-crazed pseudo-intellectual who moves from place to place and wife to wife without thought, that really drive the events of the book. Moriarty is a sort of god-figure to Paradise, who admires his impulsiveness and raw human nature, but throughout the book Paradise has to confront the fact that both Moriarty and their adventures are in some ways failures that cannot possibly live up to Paradise’s hopes for them.

There are some heartbreakingly beautiful scenes in this book; I am particularly fond of the final trip in which Sal and Dean venture to Mexico City and end up lost in a sort of marijuana-fueled haze. However, in between those heartbreakingly beautiful scenes, there is a gross amount of tedium. I suppose that is, after all, real life, but it makes for a really frustrating book. Truman Capote famously dissed Kerouac’s style by saying, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” but that doesn’t quite pinpoint the huge flaw with this book: Even at only 300 pages it’s a lumbering monster that never much answers the question why we ought to care about the minutia of the life of Sal Paradise and his jackass friend. Whereas Catcher reads so breezily that you could finish it in a matter of hours, reading On the Road can be like trying to wade through pudding.