Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in Walter Salles’ Movie On the Road

This month I read two classical “road novels.” The first was Jean Giono’s The Open Road (Grands Chemins) about two down-at-heel pals walking through the countryside of Southern France around 1950 looking to pick up cash from work or gambling. Conceived of around the same time was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road about two down-at-heel pals crossing the continent at high speed looking to pick up enough cash for gas to get to their destination. Curiously, neither writer was aware of the other, even though Kerouac came from a French-Canadian family.

Both books are well worth reading, especially as I feel that Kerouac and Giono would have admired each other’s work.

Jean Giono (1895-1970)

I had read the Kerouac decades earlier, but upon finishing Giono’s book, I thought I wanted to get on the road again, so I re-read On the Road. They were two very different authors. Giono was in love with the land of his birth as was Kerouac. Unfortunately, Kerouac’s love was so heavily suffused with alcohol that he only lasted to the age of 47. His later books, such as Big Sur, showed him to be headed down the road to liver failure.

Still, I love reading Kerouac’s books. He had such a vital enthusiasm for his friends and for mid-century America that, even in his experiments in bop prosody, something splendid shines through. Perhaps it was a never ending sense of youthfulness. Giono’s France is centuries old, but Kerouac’s America was bottled in bond in the years right after the Second World War.