The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson

Since Weldon just mentioned Hunter Thompson, it looks like I’d better act quickly. This month’s book review features the man’s opus, which I’ve casually paired against one of the novels of an earlier, and equally famous, seeker of refuge (and, as it happens, local son), Jack Kerouac.

Although their aesthetics are worlds apart (and although I couldn’t resist the title), I hold Thompson as a worthy companion read for the beat writer. I like even better to put these novels in a broader arc, and the antecedant that leaps most immediately to mind is Jerome K. Jerome shipping friends around at the turn of the last century in different conveyances. (Were I more ambitious about these of reviews, I’d take on another of Mr. Jerome’s for this series, but there’s only so much of that sort of thing I’m willing to take at a time.) Each consists of the same thinly fictionalized autobiography; each is presented with similar mixtures of escape, male bonding, comedy, and philosophical interjections. The escape is for the characters, and the hideout isn’t so much the wilderness as it is civilization’s fringe, not a matter of pitting brawn against the savage forces of nature, but rather a retreat to a place safe enough and independent enough to explore the world from the writer’s own perspective. Over the arc of these novels, this required increasingly drastic measures for the getting away. Late Victoriana could be ditched in a comfortable outing down the Thames. Kerouac needed the deep woods and old weird America to hide himself in, and only thirteen years later, it took Hunter S. Thompson copious amounts of drugs. I also like imagining this progression of philosophies, which are poked in as wistful or wondering asides, and over the intertextual century, there is a growing refutation of the status quo: from ambivalent glimpses of the human condition, to an escape from Western philosophy, to, in Thompson’s case, a horrified rebuke of it. Read the three of them together, perhaps, as commentary on how invasive society has become (and how quickly).

Continue reading Beat-ing Off: more book reviews.