A Scene from B.A.T.T.Y.

Yesterday I showed how I handled the problem of noise description in a scene from a comedic novella (code name B.A.T.T.Y.) I'm working on. I thought today I'd present the entire scene (free book sample!) along with an explanation of what the scene does and why it's constructed the way it is.

I wanted to accomplish a number of goals with this scene. The main character, Tyler Schremp, has been talked into having a quick drink at Joy Joy (a fictional restaurant/bar in Palo Alto) on the way home from work. Schremp has group therapy at seven, so the drink has to be a quickie. Both Schremp and his buddy Matt Dixon are young engineers working for a hot toy-company startup in Silicon Valley (called HoityToyty). They have a love-hate relationship with their jobs. They love creating high-tech toys, but their boss (an insufferable ass) has them working on such idiotic projects as a scent-emitting unicorn doll (Fresh Scent Cornelia). You put Glade scent-packs in the unicorn's ass, and then, assuming the batteries are fully charged, the doll spurts air freshener (in microprocessor-controlled bursts) out its anus all day.

The goals for the scene are:

• Show that Schremp and Dixon are best buds of long standing. Male bonding.
• Show their dissatisfaction with work, their eagerness to go into business for themselves.
• Have them talk about Schremp's main problem, which (at the moment) is how to reconnect with the beautiful and mysterious puppet-toting redhead he met a few nights ago.
• Do all this in a lighthearted way.

The entire scene is a segue from an office scene to a group-therapy scene. It has to cap off a lousy day at the office while paving the way for group therapy. (The redhead will show up at group therapy.) Here's the whole scene:

     The crescendo of cacophony at Joy Joy hadn't yet reached full-on Happy Hour earbleed level, but the din was prodigious -- so much so that Dixon had to go back out the front door to the sidewalk to check his voicemail while Schremp, securing the last empty stools at the bar, fetched two tall glasses of Buttface Amber (one of the featured microbrews-of-the-day) from the red-suspendered, all too jolly bartender-du-jour.
     As Dixon finally shuffled back inside, tucking his iPhone in his pocket, Schremp asked: "Anything important?"
     Dixon, accepting a beer from Schremp: "Hitler called, he wants his youth back. Other than that --"
     Schremp raised his glass, said a "Heil Mary," and took a sip. Dixon did likewise.
     Dixon: "What about you,? Any word from --"
     "Not a peep. Beginning to think I popped the clutch." Schremp licked foam off his upper lip and looked in vain for a coaster on which to see his beer, finding, instead, only a soggy cocktail napkin. "You know, maybe I just --"
     "I wouldn't worry about it," Dixon said, with a dismissive flip of the hand. "It's only been, what, a week?"
     "Yeah. Not even." Schremp was having to speak loudly now, to be heard over the background noise.
     "But you called her, right?"
     Schremp nodded as he drank. "I don't feel right leaving, you know, a hundred messages or something, though. Don't want to come across as a stalker . . ."
     "How many times have you called her?"
     "Twice. Plus one text message."
     "Pffah. Dude. That's not stalking. Take it from someone who knows." Dixon held his glass up and admired the three concentric rings of foam in the empty upper third. "Look, chug lines . . ."
     Schremp sighted across the chug lines and down the crowded bar, taking in the pot-luck assortment of helter-skelter hairdos, the predominantly northern European profiles (punctuated by the occasional soft/rounded Oriental face), checking, meanwhile, for redheads with puppets, drooping parallel e-cigs, some hint of a chocolate-suede Sole Society ankle boot. But alas, no joy, as the fighter jocks say.
     "I mean, sometimes I think maybe I am a bit obsessed with her, in a way," Schremp said, fiddling with his glass. "I keep replaying that night over and over in my mind . . . The flashbacks are on a tape loop sometimes, like when you can't get a song out of your head?"
     Dixon nodded. "Earworm. Very dangerous. One time I got Devo stuck in my head for two days . . ."
     "That happened to me with Bryan Ferry's 'Boys and Girls.'"
     "Don't know that one."
     "Well, do NOT listen to it, my friend. Understand? You'll go insane . . ."
     "Like that movie -- what's it called? -- where there's this videotape, and if you watch it, you'll die seven days later."
     Schremp nodded before making concentric Chug Line No. 7 in his glass. "The Ring. That's exactly it, that's what's happening to me. And it's been almost seven days . . ."
     "Yeah, but you're not going to die just because Marcy didn't call you back."
     "Molly. Not Marcy."
     "What's that? I can't hear you . . ."
     Joy Joy was fast approaching the Fire Marshall's room-capacity limit (or so Schremp supposed), the place packed now with clamorous roisterers intent on pushing the decibel envelope beyond airline baggage-handler recommended maximums. Cocktail glasses (three in a waitress's hands at once) clinked and clacked, cash register slamming shut as someone's stool-leg stuttered across the floor nearby ("What can I getcha?"), burly guffaws competing with soprano laughter, a sudden swoosh of street noise as fresh celebrants burst through the main entry door, wine cork's thoppp! providing a grace-note to a distant woman's rising arpeggio of giggles -- the thrum of a vox humana orchestra tuning up.
     Schremp swirled the remaining two ounces of beer in his glass. He scanned the crowd, eyes finally falling on Dixon. At the first lull in the background noise he said: "We could fix the noise problem, you know."
     "Yeah, we could go outside . . ."
     "No, I mean we could fix it. With technology."
     Dixon was game. "Go on."
     "An array of microphones in that wall over there" -- Schremp motioned with his head -- "and an array of speakers in this wall over here. Right? Invert the signal, drive the anti-noise through the speakers, time it so the noise gets canceled for these people right over here . . ."
     Dixon mused on it, nodding, far-away stare, feigning comprehension. "Interesting idea..."
     "See, if you have enough microphones, you can triangulate the origin of any individual sound in this room . . . or all of the various sounds --"
     Dixon's brows unfurled, an Aha moment slowly washing across his face.
     "-- and likewise, with an array of speakers, you can focus calibrated anti-noise on any location in the room . . ."
     "Barroom active noise suppression. BANS."
     "Exactly."
    Dixon slapped the side of Schremp's shoulder. "Freakin' brilliant. Dude, you're a genius, you know that?"
     The two clinked glasses and then knocked back the rest of their beers.
     Dixon grabbed a half-soaked cocktail napkin from the bar and used it to wipe his mouth. "This," he said, "is exactly the kind of stuff we ought to be working on. Instead of unicorns with April-fresh anal glands."
     Schremp nodded, half-smiling. "Yep. It's just about that time."
     Dixon glanced at his watch. "Group therapy?"
     "No. I mean, yeah, that too. But what I meant was, it's just about time . . . for us to turn the page. You know? Put HoityToyty behind us."
     Dixon smiled. "Ordinarily, the last thing I want to put behind me is a herd of unicorns. But in this case, my man, you're absolutely right. I'm with you. All the way."

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Painting a Picture of Noise

Yesterday, I gave a high-level overview of some of the tools available, in the English language, for describing noise. Now comes more of a practical exercise: how to portray a noisy-crowd scene in a novel or short story (or other narrative account)? 

In the comic novella I'm writing, I have a scene that takes place in a crowded restaurant bar. (The restaurant is a fictional place called Joy Joy in Palo Alto, California.) The main character's last name is Schremp. The setup: Schremp and his office mate (Dixon) have decided to hit Joy Joy for a drink on their way home from work. But it's happy hour. The place is bustling. It's loud and getting louder. The question is how to indicate that, convincingly, in the narrative.

The obvious way is to have one character say to another: "Boy it's loud in here!" (And maybe, just to emphasize the point, have the other character cup his ear and say: "What?") Nothing wrong with that, actually, except that it has only momentary impact. It's using noise as a prop. I want the noise to be more than a prop; I want it to be an integral part of the ambiance of the scene, a kind of additional main character, if you will, palpable, always lurking, ready to intrude.

In the scene's opening line, I begin with quickly telling, rather than showing, the atmosphere:

    The crescendo of cacophony at Joy Joy hadn't yet reached full-on Happy Hour earbleed level, but the din was prodigious; so much so that Dixon had to go back out the front door to the sidewalk to check his voicemail while Schremp, securing the last empty stools at the bar, fetched two tall glasses of Buttface Amber (one of the featured microbrews-of-the-day) from the red-suspendered, all too jolly bartender-du-jour.

This is both a tell and a show. The "show" part is Dixon having to go back outside to check his voicemail because it's too loud inside. Note, incidentally, the use of a musical term ("crescendo"), which sets up additional music vocabulary later.

A bit further on, which is to say after a few lines of dialog, I explain in the narrative that the background noise has become so excessive, Schremp is having to raise his voice to be heard. So, another tell. (Maybe not the best solution.)

Schremp, at one point, scans the bar looking for signs of his new girlfriend. This is a good chance to underscore the crowded nature of the place; hinting (through visuals) at the potential for noise. 

Fast-forward past another half-page of dialog. I have Dixon asking Schremp to repeat himself ("What did you say? I can't hear you..."): Back to show rather than tell. 

At this point, I immediately break off into some exposition about the noise situation. (I don't claim this is the optimal thing to do. It's what I'm happiest with at the moment.) Here's what I finally came up with:

     Joy Joy was fast approaching the Fire Marshall's room-capacity limit (or so Schremp supposed), the place packed now with clamorous roisterers intent on pushing the decibel envelope beyond airline baggage-handler recommended maximums. Cocktail glasses (three in a waitress's hands at once) clinked and clacked, cash register slamming shut as someone's stool-leg stuttered across the floor nearby ("What can I getcha?"), burly guffaws competing with soprano laughter, a sudden swoosh of street noise as fresh celebrants burst through the main entry door, wine cork's thoppp! providing a grace-note to a distant woman's rising arpeggio of giggles—the thrum of a vox humana orchestra tuning up. 

So again, a mix of tell and show. Talk of decibel limits (these two guys are engineers, BTW) and clamorous roisterers, followed by examples of some noise-sources, with recourse to musical terminology (soprano, grace-note, arpeggio), culminating in the suggestion of an orchestra tuning up. The scene ends with Schremp and Dixon discussing the noise situation and how they would fix it with technology: barroom active noise suppression (BANS). 

How would you describe a noisy bar in a restaurant? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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How to Make a Story More Visual

Screenwriters resort to a variety of tricks to make stories more visual. I'm convinced novelists should be taking advantage of some of the same tricks, because adding visuality to a story almost always improves it, whether we're talking about a novel, a short story, a screenplay, an epic poem, or what have you.

Suppose you've been tasked with writing a scene in which a reluctant hero has to seek the counsel of a seer or swami or guru. He wants the guru to tell him whether he's ready to accept the hero's challenge.

The reluctant hero has to go visit the guru at the guru's ashram. Except, the ashram is really an inner-city apartment. The question isn't what you will have the two characters say to each other. The question is what they'll do during the scene. Will they sit on the floor crosslegged and talk? (How boring would that be?) Will one sit before a chessboard, rearranging chess pieces while the other stands and chews gum? Will they sit together and stare at a Tarot deck, a ouija board, a crystal ball?

In The Matrix, the guru (the Oracle) isn't a robed, bearded sage (Obi-Wan) but a laid-back, middle-aged black woman baking cookies! That's your first clue: Use the unexpected. Make things have a different appearance than the reader (or viewer) might have been expecting. Sometimes you need to signal (visually) a person's role through costume or stature, directly and obviously (as with Darth Vader), but sometimes it's more effective to do the reverse: dress the powerful in rags, bedeck the unimportant in bejeweled regalia.

Gandhi meets the Queen of England. Who is well dressed? Who has more power over India? Ho Chi Minh meets General Westmoreland. Who's wearing peasant attire? Who's winning the war?

In The Matrix, the Oracle bakes cookies, smokes cigarettes, reads Neo's palm. Neo mostly stands around and does nothing, although, significantly, he breaks a vase early in the scene. He also notices a sign over the doorway ("Know Thyself"). You might ask yourself why the scene was written to take advantage of chocolate chip cookies, cigarettes, palm-reading, a broken vase, and a sign over a doorway in a kitchen. Are these all "just props," or do they contain messages, meanings, special connotations? Ask yourself how you would have written the scene.

It's interesting that in a later Matrix movie, there's a similar scene, in which Neo gets to visit The Architect. It's one of the most laughably ineffective scenes in movie history. Why? The Architect just sits dispassionately in a chair and goes off on a bizarrely abstruse, esoteric soliloquy about the meaning and origin of The Matrix, while Neo looks at TV images of himself. This is an example of a "dialog" scene done poorly, done non-visually. The only "visual" is the wall of TV monitors, which instantly comes across as as sterile and gimmicky. The Architect's speech is totally forgettable. It's memorable for its ludricrousness. In this scene, instead of a picture painting a thousand words, we have a guy in a chair speaking a thousand words, saying nothing.

The scene in which The Architect drones on, semi-coherently, about the design of The Matrix is
arguably one of the most laughable non-comedy scenes in major motion picture history.

In making a scene work visually, you have a number of tools at your disposal, including setting, costumes, props, situations/actions, and the choice of words you (and your characters) use to convey the scene. Try not to think of these items as disjoint Cartesian bits. (To keep you from thinking of them in that way, I'm going to resist the temptation to break them out into bullet points for separate discussion.) Think in terms of the whole. Think "performance art."

Think "performance art" even if you're writing scenes for a novel.

When one character has to give another character bad news (or any significant piece of information), try doing it symbolically, with a visual. Is your character going to leave the country, only she hasn't told her partner yet? Maybe leave a passport on a desktop or dresser. The klutzy thing to do is have Mary tell Bob directly: "I'm going on a trip." How much better is it to have Bob spot the passport on his own and ask: "What's this?" Klutzy followup: Mary says "I'm going away. This is not working." Better: Mary says "Do we have any sunblock?" (Avoid the straight-on discussion.) Better still: "Can you hand me that plastic bag?" In the plastic bag, clearly visible, is a tube of sunblock. (Props, action, implication, possible symbolism. The sunblock implies Mary is heading for sunnier weather, both literally and metaphorically.)

Is someone getting fired at work? The obvious (and not terribly engaging) way to do it is to have the boss buzz the worker on the phone and say "Can you come in for a minute?" Then there's the office scene where the boss gives the you're-being-laid-off speech.

A far better way to handle it is: Mary comes in to her office and finds the desktop clean, sticky-notes gone, her items in a cardboard box. Someone pokes a head around a corner and says; "The boss wants to see you." Cut to: Joe the Boss, sitting at his desk alone in his quiet office, door closed. Maybe he's just getting off the phone with someone. With zero warning, an office chair comes crashing through the plate glass. Mary, eyes blazing, steps over the rubble. "You wanted to see me?"

Gesticulation is often better than a line of dialog. There's a wonderful scene in The Adjustment Bureau (see my analysis here), where Matt Damon's character (a young politician) flirts with his soon-to-be serious romantic partner (played by Emily Blunt) on a commuter bus. The two had met by chance (and snuck a quick kiss in a men's room) a few days before, never suspecting they'd ever meet up again; but now they've met randomly on a bus. The bus has stopped, she gets off, the bus's door is about to close, and Damon knows he has maybe 3 seconds to say whatever it is he's going to say. As the door starts to close, he blurts out, to the woman he hardly knows: "The morning after I lost the election I woke up thinking about you." She smiles sadly and gives him the finger.

Why is that an effective moment? She doesn't know yet if she should have feelings for the guy (even though they had a quick stolen-kiss moment); she doesn't know if he's telling the truth; and if he is, he's screwing up a sweet and precious, spontaneous, largely non-verbal moment by saying something that implies true love, before they've figured out if they even like each other. He's wrecking a beautiful thing by bringing up love! She should be happy, right? No. She's been there before. She knows you can mess up the most precious part of a budding relationship with heavy "true love" bullshit. She's giving the finger not just to the Matt Damon character but to all the stupid, heavyhanded, bullshit-drama crap that messes up so many delicate, wonderful things in this life.

Emily Blunt's single-finger salute said so many things (so many) that would've utterly failed, in straight dialog.

There's the famous T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park where, before we actually see the T-Rex, before the kids-trapped-in-the-car get to stare up at the beast in Lilliputian awe, we learn how big the creature is from a glass of water. We see concentric waves start to appear in the top of the water, in rhythm to the pounding of the creature's feet (still some distance away, off-camera). In this simple manner, we're told visually how incredibly massive the creature is, long before we actually see it.

The Log Lady.

If you have a crazy-old-lady character, you can show that's she crazy by having her say crazy things, but that's the easy way out. David Lynch did it with a log. Who can forget the Log Lady?

If you need to, just put physical obstacles in a character's way. Instead of your character walking across the room to get to another character, put a chair in between the two, and make him throw the chair out of the way so he can get to the other character.

And by the way, you're not still using plain-Jane verbs like "walk" or "look," are you? Your characters should be striding, tiptoeing, trotting, glancing, staring, glaring, etc., shouldn't they? Choice of vocabulary makes a difference. Some words conjure images and activity; some are lifeless.

One final comment. Every movie has what are called "trailer moments." What are your novel's trailer moments? Every novel should have some. Don't you think?

Figure out what your story's "trailer moments" are. And: See if you can't make some of them play well even with the sound off. If you can work irony and symbolism into the mix, too, so much the better.

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More Thoughts on Visual Storytelling

In yesterday's post, I talked about the need to make fiction more visual (something I call visuality), through the use of props, setting, situation, costume, and action.

Good fiction is vivid. It conjures imagery. The weakest thing you can do is describe a scene through narrative exposition. The second weakest thing you can do is have characters "carry" the action through dialog. Good dialog is more than just characters engaging in smart, "dramatic" conversation. A memorable scene is usually memorable because of what happens visually, not orally.

Lina Wertmüller

Some screenwriters advocate writing a silent-film version of a script first, before adding dialog. For example, before finishing a script, writer-director Lina Wertmüller cuts out every line of speech and tells the whole story with visuals. When the story is sufficiently explainable through action, she adds back only the lines of dialog that are required.

Imagine what this allows you to do. When you've got a good visual story, dialog can go to the next level; you can afford to devote spoken lines to subtext, things that aren't being said, the way things are said, plus foreshadowing, back-references, innuendo, irony—you have so many things to do now, with dialog, besides carry the story.

You can try a thought experiment right now. Think of some of your favorite movies (and maybe some of your least-favorite). Which ones would still be tremendously entertaining to watch with the sound off?

Consider the first of the Star Wars movies—a visual feast from start to finish. We know, even with the sound off, that Darth Vader is the villain. The first time we see him, he's all-black, he's giving orders (and others are carrying them out), and the fact that he's a foot taller than everyone else tells us (visually) that all the Imperial soldiers around him are quite literally underlings. (Plus he of course strangles a coworker early on, which tells us this is one seriously bad dude.) The first time we see Princess Leia, we can see (with the sound off) she's being held under duress. The barroom shootout works even without subtitles. The first time we meet "Ben," he's robed, has a beard—it's pretty obvious he's a wise old man with special knowledge. The entire movie works in silent mode.

The later movies in the Star Wars series (later, as in release date) are dialog-topheavy movies that don't work nearly as well in silent mode as the original film.

The first film in the Alien series would make a very decent silent movie. The later Alien films, not so much.

Jim Carrey has been in a ton of movies. Which ones do you remember most? That's right: the ones that are highly visual. The wordplay in Dumb and Dumber is first-rate, but guess what? The movie is still funny with the sound turned off.

I'm not saying the only good movie is one that can be enjoyed with the sound off. Obviously, movies benefit from having sound. I'm saying most stories can be made better by doing the storytelling in a highly visual way.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give practical tips for boosting the visuality of your novel or screenplay. It turns out there are many ways to pry the lid off this particular can of worms.

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Visuality: How to Make Fiction More Visual

I'm firmly convinced that a solid understanding of the craft of screenwriting can only improve your fiction-writing skills. Many of the skills of good screenwriting, if transferred to novel or short story writing, make for a much-higher-impact story. I'm talking not only about story structure and dialog-related tricks, but verticality and "visuality"—making a story more vivid by making it more visual.

Visuality is something good screnwriters spend a lot of time trying to achieve. Mediocre scripts, and even some "good" scripts (of the "I like it but don't love it" variety), are often mediocre simply because they lack visual impact, relying too much on explicative dialog to move the story along. When you read one of these scripts, you get the feeling you're reading a stage play.

But even stage plays (good ones, that is) rely heavily on visuals, rather than just dialog.

Kenny Hodges in 1977.

Many years ago when I was working for The Mother Earth News, I came to be good friends with somebody at work named Kenny Hodges. Kenny was a great raconteur (I can't begin to replicate his skill here), and one of the many amazing stories he told was the story of the time he auditioned for, and landed, a part in a Broadway play.

The way he tells it, Kenny and some friends decided, on a lark, to get in line for an open reading for a play. Kenny had never done any acting. He had been a musician (the bassist in the 1960s group Spanky and Our Gang). Many people were reading for the part. The role was that of a small-town hoodlum of some kind; the reading involved dialog between the hoodlum and the county sheriff.

The dialog was fairly humdrum, the hoodlum saying to the Sheriff something like "Oh yeah? Well, you may think you're the big shot here, but you ain't got nothing, hear me? I'm the one in charge of this town. Not you."

People read for the part, one by one, and got told "Thank you" by the director (meaning: you're dismissed, have a nice day now).

I couldn't wait for Kenny to reveal the secret of how he got the part, so I interrupted him while he was telling the story and just asked him. He explained that when he got on stage to read the lines, he improvised. At the critical moment, he held out a fist, thumb pointing straight up, and said (completely off book): "See that?"

The actor playing the Sheriff stepped a little closer, looked at Kenny's thumb, and said something like "What? What's that?" Whereupon Kenny flexed his thumb and pointed to the crotch of the thumb, under the first joint, and said: "That's where you are. Right there. Right there, my friend." In essence saying "I've got you under my thumb, asshole."

It got him the part. The director had the thumb gesture written into the script. (Unfortunately, due to a musical engagement, Kenny—who never seriously thought he would get the part in the play—had to decline the role, and never got to act on Broadway.)

This is an example of the power of visuality—and the kind of thing you should be having characters do, if you're writing a script or a novel.

I'm going to continue on this theme in tomorrow's post, because there's a lot more to say about visuality and how to use it to enrich fiction.

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The World's Longest (and Best) Paragraph

In May 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his friend Neal Cassady to tell him about the road-trip novel he'd just finished. In the letter, Kerouac talked of how he had typed the entire manuscript between April 2 and April 22, on a single 120-foot roll of teletype paper, single-spaced, "just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road."

Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for On the Road.

Six years later, an edited, vastly shortened version of the manuscript (with the characters' real names changed to fictional ones) was published by Viking Penguin ("in mutilated form," Allen Ginsburg once said). In 2007, to mark the book's 50th anniversary, Viking Penguin published the original single-paragraph "scroll version" of On the Road, complete with creative spellings (and containing the sex scenes that had earlier been deemed too controversial), with original character names intact and no attempt to "correct" anything other than the most obvious typos. (The original scroll is today owned by sports magnate Jim Irsay, who paid $2.43 million for it in 2001.)

The 2007 scroll version is the edition I just finished reading, and it's the only edition of On the Road anyone should ever read, because the single-long-paragraph nature of the book and the use of real names for real people are crucial elements of the work, in my opinion.

Like Jack himself (both in the story and in the writing of the manuscript), I got off to a bad start with the book, reading the first 40 pages in one sitting, then making the mistake of letting it go cold for several days. In a book with no plot that's told completely experientially, that's printed as a single 300-page paragraph with no breaks, you have no structural reference points to hold onto, whether typographically or in the story line, which means that if you walk away from it, you forget where you were almost instantly. In my case, I found myself starting again at page one after the first false attempt. And I made damn sure to keep moving from that point on, stopping only to eat, bathe, attend to bodily needs, etc. before resuming the trip.

I got through the book with difficulty. Kerouac's language is suitably mellifluous and inventive, his reportage sincere and seemingly accurate. But the nonstop parade of nonsensical events, leavened by the tragicomic personal-life misadventures of the womanizing Neal Cassady, is ultimately tiresome. Happily, after 135 pages or so, the travelers arrive at the Burroughs ranch in Algiers, Louisiana, and the writing style pivots ever so slightly as Kerouac launches into a loving, carefully crafted portrait of the enigmatic Bill Burroughs. From there, it's back to a meandering series of road trips to New York and San Francisco (always by way of Denver), with various side trips thrown in.

The Great Depression had long since ended, of course (this was 1949), but you couldn't tell it from the indigence of the characters. Jack's monthly $18 checks from the Veterans' Administration seldom went far, what with Neal Cassady's constant need for booze, cigarettes, gasoline, weed, and bail money. What they couldn't afford to buy, they often stole. (In Cassady's case, that sometimes included cars.)

At one point in the story, Kerouac inexplicably comes into a sizable (for those days) sum of cash: $1,000. It's never explained that this was, in fact, the advance for Kerouac's first novel, The Town and The City. He uses it to move his mother from Long Island to Denver. The woman finds Denver not to her liking and moves back to New York. Money gone, Jack hits the road again.

The story accelerates and acquires an almost Hunter Thompson-like feel in Book Three (the "book" breakpoints are unceremoniously noted inline in the text, without indents or spacing) when Cassady and Kerouac agree to deliver a two-year-old Cadillac limousine from Denver to Chicago. They put over 1,000 miles on the car in 23 hours, breaking the speedometer cable after exceeding 110 mph. Along the way, they suffer various mishaps and end up turning the car over to the owner in ramshackle condition. Miraculously, the owner never sends the police after them.

Arguably the best storytelling comes in Book Four, when Cassady and Kerouac, having exhausted America's highway system, head to Mexico. The writing is vivid, piquant, engaging, endearing—unforgettable.

Of course, there is never any hint of a plot, dramatic structure, etc., and that's exactly the point of the book (and of life); the journey is itself the point. It's also why On the Road couldn't possibly find a major publisher (as it did in 1957) if it were written today. It doesn't check the checkboxes of agents' and publishers' "minimum requirements" for a novel. In fact, it quite deliberately gives the finger to all such requirements. Which is why On the Road stands virtually alone among bestselling novels of the past 70 years as being truly experimental yet also truly a quintessential piece of Americana and American literature. It would be fun to submit the book, in manuscript form (as a single paragraph) under a pseudonym, to agents and publishers, just to collect the rejection slips generated by the legions of interns and editorial assistants and self-appointed arbiters of the literary status quo who would never dare take a chance on anything as proto-gonzo as a plotless, one-paragraph, 125,000-word road diary centered around an itinerant womanizer/con-man and his urbane college-dropout buddy. Noo noo nooo, we shan't have any of this.

Today, Kerouac (if he were starting anew) would have to put out his own print-on-demand and e-book editions of his work and then go about the grim business of gaming the Amazon rating system, maintaining a blog (and Facebook page and Twitter account), and doing all the other must-do activities of writers who want to rise above the background noise of what today passes for literature, all without a hope of ever getting a review in The New York Times (much less the kind of review On the Road got from Gilbert Millstein in 1957).

We should all be glad that Kerouac and On the Road came along when they did, at a time when a quiet, humdrum, thoroughly racist, excruciatingly conformist America needed the kind of wake-up call Kerouac provided, and the kind a New York City publishing establishment was still able to give. Those days are over, of course. We're on a different kind of road now.

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