It is based on a number of trips across America which Kerouac made with Neal Cassady between 1947 and 1950 in which they had a lot of fun with drugs and sex and being broke and making friends; Kerouac is Sal and Cassady is Dean. The narrative is written in a straight line; the material seems not to be shaped or structured, the shape of the book remains true, we are led to believe, to what things were like: unplanned, spontaneous, free and easy, beautifully aimless; characters appear and disappear, events happen without meaning, the abiding presence is Walt Whitman rather than Henry James. The spirit of the book took over the lives of young people in half the world in less than ten years. On the Road has all the importance of a classic rock album or road movie.
Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts and educated at Columbia University. His other semi-autobiographical novels include The Subterraneans (1958), Big Sur (1962) and Desolation Angels (1965).
Age in year of publication: thirty-five.
Balraj Khanna 1940–
1984 Nation of Fools: Or Scenes from Indian Life
‘God in India doesn’t work. Only fools do,’ says one of Khanna’s post-Partition Hindus. Beginning in one of the camp slums which housed such refugees, this novel is like an Indian movie, rumbustious, vivid, seductive. The wayward Omi is the son of a sweet vendor. In the camp a person who makes buckets in the back garden and sells them in the front is considered an industrialist, but Omi’s father is a modern Indian bent on dragging his family up into life in the capital city by his busybody bootstraps, carting along the recalcitrant Omi.
The chaos of Omi’s adventurous youth is familiar: what is particular about Khanna’s account of Omi’s progress is the hilarity and verve of the demotic Indian English in which Omi’s family and friends communicate. They address the world lavishly in an idiom of curses, salutations and cries to heaven which brings each of the inhabitants of this Punjabi world pugnaciously to life. All of 1950s India is here, with its love for the movies, its marriages, houses of learning, wife-beaters, families at peace and war. Khanna laughs with his chorus of fools, while his sharp eye makes subtler mincemeat of religious differences and useless taboos. But it is in the character of the resilient Omi, and in his relish for language, that the excellence of this novel lies.
Balraj Khanna was born in the Punjab, India, and lives in England and France. He is one of India’s leading contemporary painters, and this was his first novel.
Age in year of publication: forty-four.
Stephen King 1948–
1987 Misery
Stephen King has produced a splendid cavalcade of popular horror novels; this one is almost like a subterranean autobiography.
Paul Sheldon, a bestselling writer, has driven himself to drink and boredom by creating a series of relentlessly popular romantic novels featuring Misery Chastain, a heroine of mindbending inanity. Killing her in childbirth in his last novel, Sheldon drives off, liberated, determined to write real fiction, and then crashes his car. Unfortunately he is rescued by a number-one fan of Misery, the lumpen Annie Wilkes, who has even named her pig after his heroine. What follows is a masterpiece of horror and black humour. Paul’s legs are smashed: Annie gets him hooked on painkillers, locks him up, torments him and eventually starts slicing off bits of his body, waving a succession of sharp instruments threateningly whenever he shows the slightest sign of not doing what she is forcing him to do: bring back from the dead her heroine Misery Chastain in yet another noxious romantic novel. This Sheldon does, and descriptions of intense physical pain alternate with sections from Sheldon’s new Misery novel — a splendid piece of romantic nonsense — and the Samurai prancings of the psychopath Annie.
Stephen King has phenomenal storytelling skills, command of popular culture and everyday things, and a brisk sense of humour. He straps his readers to the page, makes their hair stand on end and in imaginative, contemporary prose provides laughter, intelligence and tremendous entertainment.
Stephen King was born in Maine where he still lives. Carrie (1973), The Shining (1977), It (1986) and The Stand (1978) are some of his bestsellers, most of which have been filmed.
Age in year of publication: thirty-nine.
Margaret Laurence 1926–1987
1966 A Jest of God
A Jest of God is a monologue written in the present tense by a teacher in her mid-thirties who lives with her mother in a fictional town in Canada. Within one or two pages Margaret Laurence creates a complete emotional landscape and a voice which is perfectly pitched, so that the material, which may seem unpromising to certain readers, becomes intensely interesting and memorable.
The progress of Rachel Cameron, her constant fear of her colleagues and her boss, her extraordinary sensitivity to what is going on around her, to each nuance of right and wrong, are described in a way which is exact and real. Her own ability to see all sides, to understand and resist each person she comes in touch with, gives the reader an extraordinary grasp of the world she inhabits. It is a mark of Laurence’s skill as a novelist that she can place Rachel and her mother in a flat above a funeral parlour with regular references to the life and death down below without the reader feeling that this has been added on to the narrative as a way of adding significance to it. Rachel’s summer love affair with an old school friend, which is the dramatic core of the book, is riveting; at times you have to put the book aside for a while, so tense is the emotional atmosphere, so full of challenges and possibilities. A Jest of God is a small masterpiece.
Margaret Laurence was born in Manitoba, Canada, and lived there, in Africa and in England. Her other novels include The Stone Angel (1964) and The Diviners (1974). A Jest of God won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was made into the film Rachel, Rachel.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Mary Lavin 1912–1996
1969 Happiness
In ‘Happiness’, the title story of this volume, the tone is rambling, almost anecdotal, like someone chatting. And slowly then, without you noticing, a picture is built up of a whole personality, a voice, a family, a set of relationships and a past. Mother talks about ‘happiness’, what it is, and how it might be found; she is a widow with daughters living in the Irish countryside. She is visited regularly by a priest; she works in a library and possesses an extraordinary strength which kept her going after her husband died, leaving her a young widow. That experience, the realization that he was going to die, has coloured her life, so that when she too comes to die — by this time the reader is in tears — this is what haunts her. The story is a masterpiece. In another story, ‘The Lost Child’, Mary Lavin manages as much as most novelists manage: a conversion to Catholicism, Renee’s realization that her sister is gay and then the extraordinary graphic account of a miscarriage. There are also moments of pure comedy in some of these stories, as when the priest says to Renee’s gay (and Protestant) sister: ‘You are a man after my own heart, Iris,’ or Annie’s brother in ‘A Pure Accident’ who ‘where he used to think sex was the only difference between a man and a woman, it seemed, now, that maybe it was the only thing they had in common’. Mary Lavin’s work is full of strange wisdom and insight; she writes brilliantly about marriage and children, but also about celibates and outsiders.