No, Jack, you’re not a genius all the time - and especially not when you’re so high there's hardly any coherence left in what you think or write. This book actually started out really good, especially the first 150 pages or so, but then it somehow starts to slowly disintegrate. The middle part of the book consists of the transcribed taped conversations with Cody and others, which is interesting but (necessarily) disjointed. Then follows the 'Joan Rawshanks in the Fog' section, where he gives a panoramic sweep of a Hollywood movie shoot with Joan Crawford that he had witnessed in San Francisco, describing also the crowd of onlookers and members of the film crew as well as the several retakes of the scene. His visions of Cody (Neal Cassady) merges throughout the book with his visions of America (which is one of the things that makes reading this book worth the effort), and the Joan Rawshanks part is certainly an arch-American scene, and somehow ties in with the overall concept of the book (in a postmodern kind of way). But after that the book starts to disintegrate into disjointed passages, and further into disjointed sentences, and it's as if he has to remind himself again and again what he's supposed to be writing about because he can't help getting lost in poetic reverie and clever word-play.

Don’t get me wrong, I generally like Kerouac a lot, but with this book I gradually lost interest and was relieved to actually be able to finish it. He writes in the short intro: "Instead of just a horizontal account of travels on the road, I wanted a vertical, metaphysical study of Cody's character and its relationship to the general America." - While his initial concept is good, the drawback is that it gets so "metaphysical" at times that he's simply just rambling along aimlessly and being annoyingly tedious. Maybe there's a point to that as well, but if so, that point gets lost when it drags out throughout endless pages of kaleidoscopic stream-of-consciousness. There are some really good parts here, mainly in the first half of the book, and it is also worth reading because it deals with male friendship on a profound level - but still.. while it as a whole is an interesting experiment in writing, I doubt other than die-hard Kerouac fans will enjoy or appreciate all of this.




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I’ve read 9 other novels by Kerouac (7 of which I’ve given 4+ stars), and consider him one of my favorite authors, but ‘Visions of Cody’ is a tough go. The first couple of chapters are uneven, but have some nice passages in the impressionist (or perhaps modern art) manner that Kerouac paints, with him bumming around New York and thinking of his friend Cody (Neal Cassady). His friendship with Cassady was so deep that in a letter to him he effused that he was his “lover”, that he “loves you and digs your greatness completely – haunted in the mind by you”. He’s lonely, thinking about life, reading Joyce, Proust, Melville, and Céline, doing a variety of drugs, and trying to scrape up a way of getting out to San Francisco. All of that sounds pretty interesting, but even so it’s pretty dense mining the nuggets of gold out of his stream of consciousness passages.

Where the novel breaks down for me, however, is chapter 3, featuring a 130 page transcript of Kerouac and Cassady high on marijuana, rambling on about nothing in particular. In the book’s notes, Allen Ginsberg does a phenomenal job describing why he finds this section compelling in six points (briefly summarized: 1. ‘Teahead’ talk and never before been transcribed and examined, 2. Despite monotony, the gaps and changes are dramatic, 3. It leads somewhere, 4. It is interesting if you know and love the characters, 5. It’s real, and 6. It’s art and relevant to progress in Kerouac’s art). That sounds fantastic but reading it is not, and it’s followed by 90 more pages of an “Imitation of the Tape”. There are some nice bits towards the end of the book, but it’s just tough to recover from this big block in the middle, which while heralded as a radical, experimental form, is to me an incoherent, literal transcript of a couple of guys getting high. It pains me to say this, but you can do much better with his other books. ( )

Hard to read unless you're really familiar with Kerouac's writing style and the beat generation mythology. Experimental. ( )

Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac (1993)

I've enjoyed a lot of Kerouac on a fleeting basis - I was told 'On the Road' and 'Dharma Bums' were THE BOOKs to read. Lo and behold, it turns out those were just the commercial pop singles for an artist whose real masterpieces are the obscure deep album cuts.

My Desert Island Kerouac books are this and 'Doctor Sax,' for sheer aural sensual beauty. ( )