From Sal Paradise to Heavenly Lane, a short review of Kerouac's The Subterraneans

While On the Road’s Sal Paradise bombs back and forth from coast to coast compelled largely by the infectious, manic restlessness of Dan Moriarty; The Subterraneans focuses more keenly on the “San Francisco Scene,” and the paradise Leo Percepied finds on Heavenly Lane, a paradise soon lost. The jazz prose Kerouac pioneered; a stream-of-consciousness prose with the lyricism, consonance and super-concentrated imagery and literary references usually reserved for poetry; shares center stage with the subterraneans themselves and the jazz prophets to whom they throng in smoky, stoned, drunken pilgrimages. The subterraneans are “urban Thoreaus” and Frisco is their Walden Woods. If Sal Paradise seemed a saint to Dan Moriarty’s fallen angel, Leo Percepied is a deeply flawed, juvenile, narcissistic, alcoholic writer unable to successfully process the small success he’s experienced. The novel is an uncompromising, painfully critical first-person indictment that forces readers looking for a hero to look elsewhere.