 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a road trip.
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. This is one of those books that's very different for a male versus a female reader. I'd heard a great deal of rhapsodizing from male critics about this book's message of freedom, and the character of Dean Moriarty, the ultimate wild-and-crazy Fun Guy. Picking up hitchhikers, traveling alone, traveling with no money : a woman doing any of those things would have to put all her energy into protecting her physical safety - and even then she'd be accused of "asking for it." And the misogyny in the book had me grinding my teeth the whole way through. Yes, it was written in the 1950s, but there are books from that era where women get to be fully realized characters. The narrator seems to view them more as sexual appliances. At one point, Dean wants to watch Sal, the narrator, have sex with Dean's wife Marylou. Marylou's opinion on the subject is barely an afterthought. (Mercifully, Sal backs out.) Dean goes back and forth between three wives over the course of the book, cheats constantly, and barely notices the children he keeps fathering (while trying to track down his own father). At one point, while married to Camille, Dean decides he "loves" Marylou, and shows up with a gun telling her that she has to shoot him or else he'll shoot her. Marylou talks him down, but the whole horror is treated as just another wild Dean story. And when Sal gleefully recounted the fun party they'd had with the teenage girls in a Mexican brothel, I couldn't help wondering how the story would sound from the girls' point of view. It's only when Dean abandons a very ill Sal in Mexico that Sal acknowledges Dean is "a rat" - and even then he continues his weird idealization of Dean. There are times when a book is so well written that I'm able to see past rampant sexism (for instance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). But On the Road is a thinly fictionalized version of actual events, so it doesn't even have a real plot, just a lot of random conversations and roaming around going nowhere.
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