Bumbling Bunyan

DESOLATION ANGELS by Jack Kerouac. 366 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.95.

For those who dropped out after, say, On the Road, The Subterraneans or The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is remembered as a likable literary wild man, a frightener of librarians, a pie-eyed piper for young men with no socks. Perhaps because socklessness no longer seems the major menace (the young are activists now, not beatniks), Kerouac, at 43, appears mild and gentle. The effectiveness of Kerouac's prose is as erratic as before, but the woozy mid-sentence plunges from eloquence to incompetence are no longer embarrassing. It is understood--theses are written on the subject--that Kerouac refuses to rewrite on principle, and the indulgent reader is willing to let him lose a few to win a few.

Most of Kerouac's novels are about the adventures of the author in various disguises, and this one (in which he bears the name Duluoz) fills in the Kerouac chronicle for the period just before On the Road was published. As the novel begins, the author is finishing a two-month squat as a fire watcher on a mountain in Washington. The mountain across the valley from Kerouac's cabin, when seen from upside down, looks like a "hanging bubble in the illimitable ocean of space." Why is it seen from upside down? Because the author is doing a headstand. Why is he standing on his head? Because he has become interested in Buddhism, and this is his notion of how Buddhists behave.

This earnest, hopeless, engaging goofiness is the best of Kerouac, and it runs through the novel. His writing is successful because it is a sly parody of his boyishness. His books are a tall tale told at his own expense, and always at a decent remove from the truth. Duluoz-Kerouac fornicates, hops a freight, smokes pot, drinks a quart, sleeps unscathed. He is a bumbling Paul Bunyan working with blue bull.

In an intelligent introduction, Seymour Krim says in effect that he admires Kerouac but thinks he has reached the end with Duluoz and action prose, and that he should try something else. Krim is right. But if the Duluoz wandering is over, it has been a wild and sometimes exhilarating ride, from Road to Desolation Angels.

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