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goodjobrammy's review against another edition
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
I had a strong interest in the Beats some years ago, though it was mostly an interest in Kerouac. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and some others I intend to get around to more thoroughly (and indeed I've gained more of an appreciation for their less Beat-y stuff ambiently). I have, just to make things perfectly clear, a certain respect for Jack Kerouac. In my experience he gets a lot of stick rather unfairly from readers who have a lot of surface criticisms to make. I frequently find myself somewhat defensive about Kerouac.
You can enjoy reading a book and give it a 2.5-star review, is what I'm trying to say.
I first read On The Road in high school (it's unclear to me how I was such a fast reader then), and then Big Sur in college, and read a few of his shorter poems while reading this book. (Incidentally, I read virtually nothing for fun between 2019 and 2022 [Kerouac or otherwise], because I found Big Sur to be such a slog that I didn't want to read again until I read Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. This, I believe, is an anecdote that says way more about me than I had intended.) I say all of this to suggest that The Dharma Bums is the most focused of these three Kerouac novels, which helps it a lot. This section of Ray Smith's (Kerouac's stand-in for this novel) life - the slice charting his hike up Matterhorn to the end of his time on Desolation - has the trappings of a dramatic arc, and a little bit of a turn in the middle.
The below section discusses some spoilers, and makes reference to a suicide.
Right - the turn in the middle. It's very difficult to approach the character of Rosie the same way one would have in 1958 for a number of reasons, which are mostly down to the way we talk about mental illness and suicidality in the 2020s. Beyond that, it's similarly difficult for me to approach Rosie without bringing along my fragile communist sensibilities. So if you'll excuse me...
I suspect that at least part of what Gary Snyder (who is Japhy Ryder in the novel) means when he talks about misogyny in this novel stems from the way Rosie is spoken about. A woman who is clearly (both from Ray Smith's and my perspective) having a mental health episode kills herself, and Ray takes a remarkably patronizing tone about it for the remainder of the book. Mental health crises, especially in women, were not famous for being handled especially well in 1958 America - but I find this particularly hard to stomach. Seemingly the one thing Smith can ever say about Rosie is that it's so sad she wasn't enlightened like him. And every time he had something to say about her, my feeling of the book got worse and worse.
Of course, if you're familiar with Kerouac's work, there's one other dimension to this that's deeply uncomfortable. Rosie, of course, was a cipher for a real women who lived. Fictionalizing her death only to write about it like this is, frankly, unacceptable. I really can't stress enough how quickly this changed my opinion of the novel.
I would suggest this stems - in large part - from Kerouac's history of speaking rather patronizingly about women (and others) who don't share his outlook on life in his novels. It's an unfortunate pill a Kerouac reader has to swallow. But Rosie's suicide is also (given the subject matter of the book) wrapped up in Kerouac's thoughts about Buddhism. It seems that Kerouac, quite understandably, has trouble reconciling Rosie's suicide with his Buddhist beliefs. For most people, death causes a serious reckoning between the material and the ideal. (Frankly, it would be upsetting if Kerouac didn't have anything to say about it, but what he comes up with is only the next worse option.) Smith's insistence that Rosie just didn't understand his proselytizing doesn't just insult Natalie Jackson, it also cheapens his Buddhism.
Over the course of the novel, and you may be forgiven for thinking otherwise, Kerouac's ideas about Buddhism don't really ever change. Most of the revelations and insights he comes to over the course of the book are variations on the same theme - the same theme he's already arrived at by the time the novel starts up. (This, I'd suggest, is a symptom of a larger problem in Kerouac's writing - the inability to think terribly critically. Things are "good" in a Kerouac novel when he's feeling good, and they're "bad" when he feels bad. Then, once the event is written down on the page, he never casts it in a new light, or changes how he feels about it. This turns Kerouac's novels into something of a house of cards, where anything prickly or uncomfortable is easier to turn into a precarious new layer rather than deal with the contradiction and have to rebuild. In other words, and this is the most damning thing I can say about Kerouac, is that he has a lot to say but very little of it demands serious thought to digest. That's fine when you're writing about travel and the scenes of Desolation, or Matterhorn; but it crashes up really painfully against Buddhism.)
I should mention here that I'm no Buddhist, not really, so the contours of Kerouac's Buddhism and whether or not it's "good Buddhism" isn't something I can speak definitively on. I'm told there's a book by John Suiter called Poets on the Peaks that gets into Gary Snyder's thoughts on the way Buddhism appears in the novel, so I'll leave that to Snyder. And in fairness to Kerouac, the impression one gets of Buddhism through reading this novel is a wide and varied one. It's just that Kerouac's brand of it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Having said that, the rest of the book is actually quite a focused bit of Kerouac doing what he's good at. Kerouac's travel and nature sequences are great (although it's sometimes difficult to stomach his stray thoughts on money, sustainability, and trade unions from a more materialist 2024 point of view), and his prose is as always enjoyable to read. The Dharma Bums is a good idea, but it's fully punctured by the events of the middle, and it's hard to say after finishing it that it was worthwhile.
P.S.: My version of the book has cartoons on the jacket drawn by famous Norwegian cartoonist Jason. They're wonderful cartoons. You can find pictures of them online. For this reason, my copy of The Dharma Bums is my favorite print version of a Kerouac novel I own.
You can enjoy reading a book and give it a 2.5-star review, is what I'm trying to say.
I first read On The Road in high school (it's unclear to me how I was such a fast reader then), and then Big Sur in college, and read a few of his shorter poems while reading this book. (Incidentally, I read virtually nothing for fun between 2019 and 2022 [Kerouac or otherwise], because I found Big Sur to be such a slog that I didn't want to read again until I read Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. This, I believe, is an anecdote that says way more about me than I had intended.) I say all of this to suggest that The Dharma Bums is the most focused of these three Kerouac novels, which helps it a lot. This section of Ray Smith's (Kerouac's stand-in for this novel) life - the slice charting his hike up Matterhorn to the end of his time on Desolation - has the trappings of a dramatic arc, and a little bit of a turn in the middle.
The below section discusses some spoilers, and makes reference to a suicide.
I suspect that at least part of what Gary Snyder (who is Japhy Ryder in the novel) means when he talks about misogyny in this novel stems from the way Rosie is spoken about. A woman who is clearly (both from Ray Smith's and my perspective) having a mental health episode kills herself, and Ray takes a remarkably patronizing tone about it for the remainder of the book. Mental health crises, especially in women, were not famous for being handled especially well in 1958 America - but I find this particularly hard to stomach. Seemingly the one thing Smith can ever say about Rosie is that it's so sad she wasn't enlightened like him. And every time he had something to say about her, my feeling of the book got worse and worse.
Of course, if you're familiar with Kerouac's work, there's one other dimension to this that's deeply uncomfortable. Rosie, of course, was a cipher for a real women who lived. Fictionalizing her death only to write about it like this is, frankly, unacceptable. I really can't stress enough how quickly this changed my opinion of the novel.
I would suggest this stems - in large part - from Kerouac's history of speaking rather patronizingly about women (and others) who don't share his outlook on life in his novels. It's an unfortunate pill a Kerouac reader has to swallow. But Rosie's suicide is also (given the subject matter of the book) wrapped up in Kerouac's thoughts about Buddhism. It seems that Kerouac, quite understandably, has trouble reconciling Rosie's suicide with his Buddhist beliefs. For most people, death causes a serious reckoning between the material and the ideal. (Frankly, it would be upsetting if Kerouac didn't have anything to say about it, but what he comes up with is only the next worse option.) Smith's insistence that Rosie just didn't understand his proselytizing doesn't just insult Natalie Jackson, it also cheapens his Buddhism.
Over the course of the novel, and you may be forgiven for thinking otherwise, Kerouac's ideas about Buddhism don't really ever change. Most of the revelations and insights he comes to over the course of the book are variations on the same theme - the same theme he's already arrived at by the time the novel starts up. (This, I'd suggest, is a symptom of a larger problem in Kerouac's writing - the inability to think terribly critically. Things are "good" in a Kerouac novel when he's feeling good, and they're "bad" when he feels bad. Then, once the event is written down on the page, he never casts it in a new light, or changes how he feels about it. This turns Kerouac's novels into something of a house of cards, where anything prickly or uncomfortable is easier to turn into a precarious new layer rather than deal with the contradiction and have to rebuild. In other words, and this is the most damning thing I can say about Kerouac, is that he has a lot to say but very little of it demands serious thought to digest. That's fine when you're writing about travel and the scenes of Desolation, or Matterhorn; but it crashes up really painfully against Buddhism.)
I should mention here that I'm no Buddhist, not really, so the contours of Kerouac's Buddhism and whether or not it's "good Buddhism" isn't something I can speak definitively on. I'm told there's a book by John Suiter called Poets on the Peaks that gets into Gary Snyder's thoughts on the way Buddhism appears in the novel, so I'll leave that to Snyder. And in fairness to Kerouac, the impression one gets of Buddhism through reading this novel is a wide and varied one. It's just that Kerouac's brand of it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Having said that, the rest of the book is actually quite a focused bit of Kerouac doing what he's good at. Kerouac's travel and nature sequences are great (although it's sometimes difficult to stomach his stray thoughts on money, sustainability, and trade unions from a more materialist 2024 point of view), and his prose is as always enjoyable to read. The Dharma Bums is a good idea, but it's fully punctured by the events of the middle, and it's hard to say after finishing it that it was worthwhile.
P.S.: My version of the book has cartoons on the jacket drawn by famous Norwegian cartoonist Jason. They're wonderful cartoons. You can find pictures of them online. For this reason, my copy of The Dharma Bums is my favorite print version of a Kerouac novel I own.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Mental illness, Misogyny, Sexual content, Suicide, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis
Minor: Alcohol