Book Review: 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac

Let me start by saying I don't usually read "classic" books unless they really strike me as something I'll enjoy or find interesting. I don't believe in reading a book simply because someone at some point in history deemed it as amazing literature. But if I'm going to be reading a classic, it will most likely be a cult classic. I guess that's just the kind of classics that I'm attracted to. This is how my desire to read Kerouac's On the Road was born.

First of all, I found On the Road really easy to read. I actually read it in one afternoon. I didn't intend to, but I found the prose really easy to speed through and it just kind of happened that way. I was happy to find that the prose and style weren't written in some sort of pretentious tone that I find most classics are written in, and that's why we're supposed to bow down to them. It also wasn't as hard to follow as I expected it to be. I loved The Bell Jar, but it was super hard to follow. The same with Play It As It Lays; super easy to blow through, but hard as hell to follow. On the Road was none of these, and for that I am grateful. But, above all, I feel like the prose isn't exactly writing; it's just words strung together relaying some sort of turn of events. I guess some might classify this as writing, but to me, Kerouac's style was lacking something to make it more interesting. Not that it was boring, but it was just lacking something that I can't exactly put my finger on.

So, my feelings towards On the Road were fairly mixed once I finished it. When this happens, I usually put my faith into the trusty Goodreads to see what other people thought. Let me just say that the Goodreads reviews for this book were by far the funniest I've ever seen. It went from "this book completely changed my life", to "Kerouac and On the Road are a complete narcissistic and paternalistic piece of garbage", to (my personal favorite) "this book gives me anxiety attacks on sleepless nights". Personally, I can't agree with the people who call On the Road a narcissistic and paternalistic piece of garbage. Even though it's about people, beatniks of the Beat generation, "on the road", careless and fancy-free, you have to remember that this took place in the early 1950s. Even those who broke out of social norms were still strained by them, at least from our modern perspective. So, yes, On the Road's narrator, Sal, is at times very ignorant and paternalistic. But hey, it's the 50s and he's a white man; honestly, what were you expecting? I think the book does have a lot of aspects that are clearly outdated, but again, that is kind of the point. You're reading a book that is, essentially, about the origins of the hippie movement. Things are not the same in present day.

I managed to overlook and even chuckle at the outdated social norms in On the Road. But, if I may join the critics who judge it too harshly based on that for just a second, I would have enjoyed it so much more if Sal, the narrator, had recognized his feelings for Dean Moriarty, the beatnik who essentially inspires Sal to go out on the road. The way Sal continuously talks about Dean... I'm sorry. From my modern perspective, there were feelings there. It's a shame it couldn't have happened. This is your modern book critic who tries to make every fictional man gay signing off now. 3.5/5 stars.

(I love this quote, even though it will always remind me of a high school English teacher that I despised who completely overused it.)

Book Review: 'The Widow' by Fiona Barton

Ah, what can I say about The Widow?

Well, if you like a good psychological thriller that will rock your world, keep looking, because this was exceptionally bad.

I know better than to believe a book's back cover when it says, "Perfect for fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train!" I know that's entirely a marketing scheme by publishers to sell books. That's not why I bought The Widow. I bought it because it sounded interesting and I thought it would give an interesting and thrilling voice and story to the woman behind a man who did something terrible. I'm now learning that not only do publishers compare their latest novel to other bestsellers to sell books, but they also word their back-cover premises to sell books and, as a result, completely mislead the story. The Widow offers you none of what the back cover promises, trust me.

This thriller is supposed to be about a woman, Jean Taylor, whose husband dies unexpectedly when he is hit by a bus. Not only that, but her husband, Glen Taylor, was certainly a man of interest in the years before his death, suspected of kidnapping and murdering a young girl who went missing four years prior. So when he dies, you expect Jean to shed her layer of anti-feminist compliance and become a badass or something, right?

Wrong. She stays exactly the same. She changes nothing. She is still a scared and emotionally immature widow who stood behind her husband when he really didn't deserve it. That's not to say she stood behind him out of shear human decency, no. She merely stood behind him because she didn't know any better.

The Widow does not offer a particularly liberating view of women, nor a portrait of a marriage. I may need to quickly go check a calendar, but it is 2016, right? Not 1956? In what universe are readers supposed to be intrigued by a woman who passively agrees to every eyebrow-raising thing her husband does, from losing jobs to explaining away his habit to watch online pornography? Does the lady who wrote this book really expect her readers to be riveted by a woman standing behind her husband, just because he's her husband and that's what she "has to do"? C'mon.

But the thing that bothers me most about The Widow is that it completely fails as a character study, which was one thing that it could have particularly excelled at. Let me accept for a minute that Jean Taylor is not the feministic thriller heroine I enjoy. I'll accept that, for argument's sake. I'm willing to accept any kind of character if their testimony is convincing enough, and that's just the problem here. In a novel whose title and back-cover description promise an intriguing delve into the mind of a woman who kept her husband's secrets for too long, testimony and revelations on Jean's part are shockingly infrequent in The Widow. I don't feel I know Jean Taylor any better than she knows herself. This is a clear sign of weak characters and plot, not to mention the fact that the majority of the novel is from the perspectives of boring, commonplace police detectives trying to figure out what happened to a little girl. Just...don't read this. 2/5 stars.