Whether it’s a Jonathan Franzen novel or an AMC TV show we won’t know how good Freedom or Mad Men truly are for some years to come. Only with the test of time can we tell if a work of art is still remembered, enjoyed, talked about. In lieu of the recent Pulitzer debacle, it seems reasonable to ask how many literary prize winners are remembered ten years down the road, never mind fifty.

If just a few years seems old in the book world (try naming that Giller winner from 2007), consider what a feat it is for On the Road to turn fifty-five this year. And how sprightly and agile it looks for its age! Here’s a book being put up on the big screen at Cannes this week by Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, a book that still find its way onto Staff Pick’s tables in bookstores across the country, a book that both Time Magazine and the Modern Library included in their best novels of the twentieth century lists a few years ago.

How does Jack Kerouac’s most famous novel do it? There are the academic reasons, of course. On the Road put a name and a stamp on the generation he called Beat. It can serve as an historical/gossipy document of poets and writers disguised in name only, and barely, with Allen Ginsberg (Howl) as Carlo Marx and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) as Old Bull Lee. Kerouac himself stands in as the tale’s narrator, Sal Paradise, while Neal Cassady, a kind of living legend we would likely have never known if Kerouac hadn’t immortalized him in the wild and dizzying character so much at the centre of On the Road, Dean Moriarty.

Then there is the mythic legend of the book’s creation: that Kerouac spun the whole thing out in a drug-fuelled writing binge that spanned but three weeks. It was to that myth – as more than one Kerouac biography has discovered – that Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) famously rejoined, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” The reality is that while Kerouac did indeed produce one famously long scroll of a draft written in three weeks, he had been writing early drafts of the novel from three years prior.

REBEL YELL

On the Road’s ongoing popularity must also come down to its being a wild and wonderful account of true rebels, meaning characters who were rebels at a time when rebellion actually meant something. A time when J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was still a shock for its teen angst. A time when Rebel Without a Cause was a marvel to a culture still working hard to keep up the veneer of gentility so faithfully recreated in nostalgic shows like TV’s Mad Men. It explains, by the way, at least one reason for that show’s success. Style aside, when you faithfully recreate a society so bound up by Communist paranoia and racial prejudice and just general xenophobia of one kind or another, you give your characters a whole world to rise up against. I would doubt if Dean and Sal’s road trip adventures and less than sober sexual escapades would ring nearly as exciting or subversive today.

FREE FORM, FREE STYLE

The context here is as critical as the newness of the form Kerouac was creating.. To write this piece I re-read the book, one I had loved like so many in their twenties. What struck me this time round was the sheer musicality of the language, the free-flowing wonder of it, the jazzyness (pun intended) of it. Most captivating of all is how the autobiographical stream-of-consciousness and fluidity of the writing perfectly captures the spontaneity and energy of the adventures and spiritual journeys of the people Kerouac brought so vividly to life.

 … then they danced down the streets … and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are made to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

In a meandering story that is, as the title suggests, mainly concerned with Sal and Dean’s adventures driving back and forth across the United States, the story here is not the thing. In his book Why Kerouac Matters John Leland reveals a letter Kerouac wrote to a student in 1961. “Dean and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.”

Critics have written that the real heart of On the Road and its ongoing attraction, particularly to young people, is that it’s a book about longing for belief and people searching out the meaning of life. In a modern world that often feels empty with the busyness of screaming advertisements and the streamingness of endless tweets, the honesty and innocence of a book so much about the quest for meaning is a welcome respite.

BOOK BEFORE MOVIE

Before the movie comes out, if you’ve never read it before, or even if like me you have and would consider revisiting, here’s your last chance to (re-)discover for yourself what Dean Moriarty looks like. A chance to picture the places between Mexico and New York that he, Sal Paradise and all of the boys and gals they meet go, and where they dance and yell and philosophize and screw. To see it all for yourself, in your mind’s eye, before actors too pretty, too skinny, too breadlessly chinless (the girls) and two six-pack gymful (the boys) try to portray characters who never would have looked like that, not back in the 50s when the story takes place.

I’m not saying I won’t see the movie. In fairness, Coppola’s production of On the Road is being directed by Walter Salles, and he helmed what to my mind is the best road movie made in the last couple decades, The Motorcycle Diaries, based on the book of the same name. How true to the book the movie can remain is of course the big question.

As for the novel, On the Road stand up as a legendary book by a romantic for romantics, for all those “confused and hung-up” as Sal puts it of himself, “running from one falling star to another till I drop.” Before you do …

Ken Babstock is inarguably one of the most important voices in contemporary Canadian poetry.  The Griffin Prize is one of the preeminent awards a poet can receive, and this year, Babstock's talent has been recognized by the Griffin trust with an inclusion on the shortlist.  The winner will be announced on June 7, 2012, and today, we’re pleased to share a poem from Babstock's latest collection, the Griffin-nominated Methodist Hatchet.

****

Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary

Cargo has let down

her hair a little and stopped pushing

Pliny the Elder on

the volunteer labour.

During summer it was all Pliny the Elder,

Pliny the Elder, Pliny

the — she’d cease only

for Scotch thistle, stale Cheerios, or to reflect

flitty cabbage moths

back at themselves

from the wet river-stone of her good eye. Odin,

as you already know,

was birthed under

the yew tree back in May, and has made

friends with a crow

who perches between

his trumpet-lily ears like bad language he’s not

meant to hear. His mother

Anu, the jennet with

soft hooves from Killaloe, is healthy and never

far from Loki or Odin.

The perimeter fence,

the ID chips like cysts with a function slipped

under the skin, the trompe

l’oeil plough and furrowed

field, the UNHCR feed bag and restricted visiting

hours. These things done

for stateless donkeys,

mules, and hinnies — done in love, in lieu of claims

to purpose or rights —

are done with your generous help. In your names. Enjoy the photo.

Have a safe winter

outside the enclosure.

***

Thanks to our friends at House of Anansi Press for their assistance in sharing this poem.  We wish Ken Babstock luck on June 7^th.

And an update - another nomination for this collection, this time for the Trillium Award - so best of luck on June 20th, as well!

We have a cover!

The final volume of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, now has an image to its name.

For everything Wheel of Time, follow my blog progress in reading through the series in A Year in The Wheel of Time.

We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost – not necessarily in that order.

Billy Abbott is the teenage boy who wants to become a writer and be with an older woman, a librarian, Miss Frost, when In One Person opens in the fictional town of First Sister, Vermont in the 1950s. Miss Frost is one of a number of characters this adolescent will lust after in the early part of the book. If you are familiar with John Irving’s work you already see how well this fits his oeuvre. The international bestselling author's themes are so well known Wikipedia has a literal checklist: the New England setting, a central character who is (or will become) a writer and, in the case of In One Person, quite a few of what Wikipedia categorizes as “sexual variations,"  to name a few.

Irving, who turns 70 this year, is brave. That’s what I kept thinking as I read In One Person, a book that long before its release had buzz as a “return to form” for an author who already has a National Book Award (for The World According to Garp) and an Oscar (for his adaption of his novel The Cider House Rules) to his credit. Like a great actor (and this book is filled with thespians) Irving throws himself into the role of his protagonist, Billy Abbott, the teenage boy so in love with that librarian, Miss Frost and in so doing, immerses us in his vivid world.

As the novel’s narrator we slip, like the author, into Billy’s shoes and join him as he develops this crush on the older woman. She doesn’t have large breasts, but Billy doesn’t mind. Nor does he find it a problem how starkly in contrast Miss Frost’s girlish chest is with her “broad shoulders,” “her mannish size and obvious physical strength.” All this to say that when Irving reveals that Miss Frost, Alberta is her first name, is not actually a woman, or wasn’t born that way, it doesn’t much matter. Irving has to convincingly taken us into this improbable relationship that we’re in it the whole way with our narrator. So what if Alberta was once an Albert? Billy sure doesn't. He's a bisexual, hence the novel's title.

In one of Irving’s most beloved novels, A Prayer for Owen Meany, the narrator, John Wheelwright, is best friends with Owen. Although Owen – with his diminutive stature and unusually high-pitched voice – is the memorable heart of the book, it is John who tells his story. With In One Person, on the other hand, the narrator, Billy Abbott is the story’s centre. What makes Irving’s latest novel so bold is that instead of casting the bisexual character as the Owen Meany of the story - that is to say the narrator’s best friend - this time Irving puts himself (ahem), his narrator in the Owen Meany spot. Despite what we may want of the world today, a bisexual narrator remains a racy choice for a “mainstream” novel, especially an Irving novel so squarely set in mid to late twentieth century New England and the private school campus world he so clearly loves. And not once does Irving wink us into suggesting that HE the author is NOT bisexual. Instead Irving becomes Billy, throwing caution to the wind, not giving a damn at how uncomfortable some readers might be at reading less than network-television prescribed sex scenes.

Alberta Frost is not the only cross-dressing character to saunter across Irving’s elaborate stage. To that metaphor, much of the first half of In One Person revolves around the world of amateur theatre, either at Favorite River Academy (the “almost prestigious private school") or First Sister Players, the community theatre company. It should come as no surprise that Shakespearean comedies are on the bill considering the myriad sex role reversals Shakespeare brought into plays like Twelfth Night and how perfectly they fit a novel so full-up with cross-dressing characters. Billy’s grandfather Harry Marshal, for instance, who owns the town of First Sister’s Sawmill and Lumberyard, is quite the actor and is actually better known on stage for his portrayal of women than men. He often has to compete with his eldest daughter,Muriel, for plum roles. But this never becomes Monty Python mocking. Irving doesn't once “hams it up” or stand above his characters. You only ever laugh with them, not against. It should come as no surprise that the most unattractive characters in the book are also the most homophobic.

In One Person is not solely concerned with sexual desire. Billy also wants to become a writer. This the most consistent of all John Irving’s themes, all 13 of his novels have a writer in them, often as the central character, and In One Person is no exception. Billy calls Great Expectations the “crucial Dickens novel – the one that made me want to be a writer.” It’s an interesting coincidence (I think!) that Irving’s thirteenth novel references Great Expectations as much as it does since that was thirteenth novel Dickens wrote. Granted, In One Person is not in any way thematically similar to Dickens great book, in part because Dickens wasn’t predisposed to writing about bisexuals. Nevertheless, Irving who has never been secretive about his love of Dickens, not only overtly speaks to this in his latest novel, he uses the tried and true storytelling twists and ultimate returns of his nineteethn century mentor to tell a very twenty-first century tale (set in the twentieth).

What makes all of this work – what makes it matter –  is that magical ingredient no writing school can teach and that few academic classrooms will preach. The same way J.K. Rowling can send so many on that train to Hogwarts, John Irving casts a spell with this book as he has so well with his great books of the past. Like Dickens, with In One Person Irving demonstrates his transportive ability to pull you in. You become these characters, you live with them, want for them, get angry at them and ultimately love them. What more need a novel accomplish?

Read the opening from John Irving's In One Person.