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March 5, 1950
Of Growth and Decay
By JOHN BROOKS
THE TOWN AND THE CITY
By John Kerouac.
n this big, rambling first novel, John Kerouac tells of a Massachusetts family that is gradually dissolved by the recent war, the forces of modern life and the passage of time. There are eight children in the family; the author treats five of them, in addition to the two parents, at considerable length, probing into their motivations and their rather complex relationships. An inclusive subject, or group of subjects; but this is an inclusive book--a rough diamond of a book.
Mr. Kerouac is most concerned with Peter Martin, an exceptional and yet believable young man, a football player and something of a poet, a young man who wants to go everywhere and know everyone and live all possible lives, yet a young man of thought as much as of action. Peter comes off engagingly. Of his brothers and sisters, we see most of Liz, an effective addition to the gallery of fictional portraits of lost American girls; his elder brother Joe, a vagrant who, it is suggested, will eventually find himself; and Francis, a particularly bloodless and arrogant intellectual whom Mr. Kerouac presents with a sort of documentary coolness but without much sympathy.
The war scatters the family and brings the parents to New York City, where they are fish out of water; the book ends with a series of pathetic encounters between fragments of the family in New York.
One gets the feeling that the author grew spiritually and improved technically while writing "The Town and the City." The early scenes in Massachusetts tend to be overly idyllic in content and wordy, even ungrammatical, in presentation. On the other hand, Mr. Kerouac's somewhat Dostoevskian view of New York City life is certainly exaggerated in another direction, but it is powerful and disturbing.
In this phase a good many of his characters take dope and practically all talk a good deal about madness. Some actually do go mad; those who don't, succeed in illuminating convincingly some of the more sinister corners of middle-class metropolitan life.
Like Wolfe, to whom he seems to owe much, Mr. Kerouac tends to overwrite. Admirably, however, he avoids imposing a false thematic framework on his material, pinning everything by force to "lostness" or "loneliness." His is the kind of novel that lets life lead where it will. More often than not, the depth and breadth of his vision triumph decisively over his technical weaknesses.
A member of The New Yorker staff, Mr. Brooks is the author of a novel, "The Big Wheel."
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