I imagine Tom Waits reading Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels when he got inspired to write lyrics for his early albums like Nighthawks At the Diner or Heartattack and Vine. I can also imagine Jim Jarmusch reading this and then hurrying off to make films like Stranger Than Paradise or Down By Law. This is definitely Kerouac at his best.
This novel begins where The Dharma Bums ended, with Jack Duluoz alone on Desolation Peak, employed as a fire lookout for a whole summer. The solitude and boredom begin to eat away at him so he plunges into daydreams and random memories of his past while meditating on the nature of existence. Some of these passages are scattered, some are lucid, some are downright nonsense but in the world of jazz no one asks what Louis Armstrong meant when he sang scat and no one tried to figure out what Charlie Parker meant when blew rapid-fire staccato imrovs on his trumpet. You just listen, feel it, and go with it.
Desolation Angels is as much a work of jazz as it is a work of literature. It is an extended piece of music played through the medium of language. Kerouac works his words into a rhythmic progression and riffs on until he knows, by instinct, when it is time to move on to another mode. The novel really picks up when Duluoz comes down off the mountain. He hitchikes to San Francisco and meets up with his bunch of friends. Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend make appearances thinly disguised as Irwin Gardener and Simon Darlovsky. Greogry Corso shows up as Raphael Urso. Neal Cassady is Cody Pomeray. There are others who can be recognized from previous Kerouac books. William S. Burroughs shows up later when Duluoz travels to Tangiers. The media begins to take notice of the Beat Generation literary scene and this bunch of guys do what they ordinarily do, run around getting drunk, getting high, getting laid, listening to jazz and having some wild conversations that sound like Arthur Rimbaud and Andre Breton arguing about passages from Finnegans Wake.
Desolation Angels is a lot more oriented to the places Duluoz goes to. There is less writing about road trips and more subjective, stream of consciousness thought overlaying everything that takes place in the cities he vists. The narrator tries to see the angelic and lonely side of everyone he encounters and that leads to him drawing some sharp and vivid portraits of a lot of people. Kerouac had a talent for writing quick and easy descriptions of others so they appear just as if you see them in the flesh but he also describes them so you get little glimpses and glimmers of who they are. Those insights are brief but also vivid and easy to relate to. The world Duluoz lives in is one populated by sad and somber people and he truly wants to believe that all of them are good.
A lot of Jack Duluoz’s thought is deep, reflective, meditative, often serious but peppered with bits of humor that tend to be a bit dark. He contemplates a lot on Buddhist philosophy and Christian theology, though neither strain of his spirituality is orthodox. He gives you a mishmash of ideas about the emptiness of existence, the fact that nothing matters in the end because we all die, nothing exists but the Void, being is permeated with nothingness but still God needs to be praised, Jesus needs to be loved, Buddha needs to be learned from, and he tried to fill the blank spaces of life with passion and vivacity. He rebels against the bleak, joyless life of middle, industrial-era America. He brings passion to everything he does and infuses it everywhere he goes. He wants the whole world to vibrate with ecstasy. Duluoz is a hedonist with a gentle nature, a heart of gold, and a mind saturated with combustible bursts of music. He celebrates his status as an outsider, an eccentric, a manic wildman both foolish and wise simultaneously.
Another theme that runs through Desolation Angels is the creeping trendiness of the Beat Generation, or the “Beatniks” as the media so offensively labeled them. As the author starts getting on in years, the younger crew of imitators and wannabes start to get on his nerves. Duluoz and his friends are conscious of their growing celebrity status as well and he wants very little to do with it. In his mid-thirties, Duluoz finds he is not immune to the cycles of life. He gets tired of wandering and rambling and starts to consider settling down. He wants a wife but instead takes his mother from Florida to California to live with him. She enjoys the time they spend in New Orleans and Nogales despite the painfully long crosscountry bus ride but decides she wants to return to Florida after a couple weeks in Berkeley.
Jack Duluoz finds his unconventional lifestyle and undisciplined friends bother his conservative, working-class mother. He does not say it loudly but you can tell he feels hurt by the rejection. He also comments on the unrequited love of his father. It makes me wonder if all the times he insists on shouting out his love to God, if he is, in actuality, trying to fill the void left by his emotionally distant parents. After all, while he puts so much emotion into praising divinity, all he hears is the echo of his own voice. God never responds, there is only silence. In the high-octane, hyperactive madness in Kerouac’s writing there is always a sad undercurrent of solitude and despair. Why else would he abandon himself so maniacally in boozing, partying, and writing books about it all? It’s like he wanted the sanctity of transcendent joy to be imminent so that the vast Buddhist Void or the anxious empty spaces in his mind could be filled.
Desolation Angels is Jack Kerouac’s most fascinating novel. Once the prose begins to flow it never stops. It reads like a hurricane of emotions that sweep the reader in a whirlwind of language and wild emotions. It is also the kind of book you can re-read several times and always discover something new. Kerouac’s writing is so intimate and candid you can feel like you actually know him. There were even times when I felt like his words were coming out of my own head rather than off the page where they actually are. After reading this novel several times, this feeling has grown stronger with age. I tend to avoid religious thought as much as I can but I think if angels existed, Jack Kerouac would have become one, when he died, to watch over us and try to make us feel lively and excited about everything we set out to do.
Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. Paragon Books, New York: 1979.
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