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For some reason I recently got it into my head that I should read The Dharma Bums in the near future, so when I spotted a pristine copy on my library's "New Arrivals" shelf it seemed like fate. Now that I've read it, I'm bewildered. What is this book? Are we meant to take it seriously? I was alternately amused, annoyed, disturbed, and edified by it, and there was no overlap in these feelings. I never felt amused AND annoyed; never felt disturbed AND edified. Only one thing at a time. And so I will take these feelings one by one.

I was amused!

Most of The Dharma Bums is written in a casual style and is simply about "Ray Smith" (Jack Kerouac) and his friends "Alvah Goldberg" (Allen Ginsberg), "Japhy Ryder" (Gary Snyder), and other lesser Beats hanging out together. This casual, conversational style had the effect of making me feel like I was there with them. Pretending I was in the room with these obnoxious party people who are somehow some of the most revered writers of the 20th century was fun! I imagined how I would laugh at the way they drunkenly ran their mouths off, so in love with their own brilliance. I pictured myself rolling my eyes when they suggested I participate in "yabyum." I thought about what it would be like to laze around Berkeley and Oakland, bumming rides off people, drinking jugs of port (did people do this a lot back then? There seemed to be jugs of port everywhere), and crashing on other people's floors. It was like a vacation to a world I never knew I wanted to visit.

I was annoyed!

Except for an amusing episode when Kerouac and his friends decide to climb Matterhorn Peak, The Dharma Bums had no narrative momentum whatsoever. Despite the book's appealing elements, it was easy to put down and easy not to pick up again. It was self-indulgent to an absurd degree. And it was pretty sexist and occasionally racist. I was expecting that so it wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't unpleasant. Kerouac and his friends are all about personal freedom, but only when it comes to young white dudes like themselves.

I was disturbed!

Jack Kerouac depicts himself as an obvious alcoholic, yet it somehow doesn't seem obvious to him. He's unable to do anything without the ubiquitous jugs of port, and when his friends and family call him on it, he's dismissive. The poet Gary Snyder is both his best friend and his biggest challenger in this regard, asking him how he expects to be mindful when he's in a near-constant state of intoxication, often wondering why he spends so much time lying around drinking instead of doing things. Kerouac just brushes it off. At one point while hiking with Snyder, Kerouac idly wonders which of them will die first. As of this writing, Gary Snyder is still alive. As of this writing, Kerouac has been dead for nearly 50 years, succumbing to alcohol-related ailments 12 years after the events of this book, at the age of 47. Knowing this cast a shadow over the book that was impossible to ignore.

I was enlightened!

I said "edified" above, because this book doesn't literally cause enlightenment. It is, however, a fascinating document of the way people try to live out their Buddhist ideals. Kerouac often depicts himself meditating and trying to be at one with the natural world, but he's also willing to admit that he's sometimes depressed on his solitary travels and has to take a few moments to cry. The arguments he has with Snyder and Ginsberg about the various tenets of Buddhism and how they should play out in their lives were fascinating, real, and unlike anything I've read before. And Kerouac's compassion for people in general comes through all the time. He laments the way people seem mesmerized by TV ("everybody's thinking the same thing") but also has faith in their ability to be better; while hitchhiking he talks about meditation with a random stranger who picks him up, and isn't surprised with the stranger admits that he's always wanted to try it himself. "Everybody knows everything," Kerouac says approvingly, and as a reader you can really believe it, that everyone is trying to be better, that everyone has the answers deep inside of them if only they can get in touch with them. But it's a process that's full of contradictions. Kerouac spends a couple of months on fire lookout high in the mountains of Washington State, where there's a daily battle between his awed appreciation of the natural world, and his complete isolation. He has moments of sadness and depression but then is shocked awake by beauty: "Okay world," he says, "I'll love ya." These contradictions and battles are at the heart of Kerouac's entire personality, his entire view of the world and his place in it. At one point, Kerouac marvels at a sunset high in the mountains, the light seeming to illuminate a hope that's "brilliant and bleak beyond words." He could just as easily have been describing himself.