This is the third book by Kerouac I have read, and without fail, they all have an unusual raw emotional gravity about them. This book is short burst of linguistic invention--supposedly written in only three days, and it reads as such. It weighs in at a little over 100 pages, but is full of love, disgust, drunkenness, excitment, and the peculiar next-day regret hangover. It does not match either On the Road or The Town and the City in terms of overall narrative power, but is a strangely compelling book after you adjust to Kerouac's fevered prose style. The Subterraneans is sometimes difficult to read--Kerouac can go for pages without paragraph or punctuation--but does become more manageable as the book nears conclusion.
There is some weakness in the portrayal of the supporting characters, and the novel is much more interested in painting vivid word-pictures that give the reader a sort of strobe-light impression of events than it is in any kind of serious character study. But if you are a Keraouc fan, you know what you are getting into here. And while I did find myself on the fence about whether I actually enjoyed the book as I worked through it, the ending was strong enough to pull over into the plus column. As a final note, it is humorous to take a look at the Kerouac reviews on Amazon and notice how the reviewers tend to take on Kerouac's writing style to a degree as they review his books--an amusing feature which I am afraid that I have succumbed to as well.
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