Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely Jack
Review: This book is a poingnant tale of the trials of life, as seen through the eyes of a boy, who watches his family changing and aging, even as he does the same. Peter Martin's reactions to everyday life are heartwrenchingly accurate. We watch his family scatter throughout the earth with the onset of WWII, and see first-hand the devastating repercussions of the war on this all-too-real household. The Town and the City was Kerouac's first novel, and what a work of literature to call your first! He was compared numerous times to Thomas Wolfe upon the first publishing, and it's no wonder. Filled with lush description and prose, this book will take your breath away and break your heart. For those who are skeptical of Kerouac's sometimes chaotic "spontaneous prose" style, fear not. While The Town and the City echoes the spontaneity of Kerouac's future works, it also contains a solid, beautiful sructure to relish and savor. Intricate layers of life intertwined so delicately they will make you cry, I promise you it will be highlighted, tattered and dogeared in a very short time. If you're looking for a book you can keep at your bedside that contains any kind of pre-sleep passage you could long for (from jubilant to forlorn, and everything in between), this is it. The Town and the City is the book you feel inside you everyday, playing out as the very essence of living itself, and the most beautiful thing of all is that it's already been written for you to enjoy again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of the artist as a young man.
Review: For hipster Kerouac gurus and one-time readers of On the Road alike, The Town and the City offers a much needed pre-spotlight autobiographical perspective on an incredibly fascinating and elusive author. For those who have read much of his work, picking up T&C is like opening a time capsule and taking a peek at Picasso when he cast his first brush stroke. For those that don't understand, let me shed light. Upon the publication of On the Road (Kerouac's critically acclaimed second novel), Kerouac became a literary folk hero. His writing style for that book was experimental by his own definitions...completely on a limb from the great american novelists he lists as his influences. Where Kerouac had once been fascinated with the intricate stories of the individual and the family, he became fantastically famous for stories of expansive adventure and spastic interpersonal relationships. What many don't know is that behind the guise of the first beatnik wanderer lurks a "great american novel" of entirely different proportions. A novel tailor-made to Thomas Wolfe proportions, so much that it borrows heavily on language, style, and even historical development aspects. Read back to back with Look Homeward Angel (Wolfe), the Town and The City becomes a remarkable way spy on an artist experimenting with style and drawing upon his own childhood and library to craft something of epic proportions for a freshman effort.
Rating:
Summary: I Love This Book
Review: I had read virtually everything ever written by Jack, excluding
this book, because I'd heard it was his "Tom Wolf" novel and he'd
yet to develop his own style...so after all these years I finally
got around to reading it...and was absolutely overwhelmed by
how great it is...so if you're a Kerouac lover and haven't read
this "family saga" yet, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Other reviewers have described it well, so I'll just mention two
highlights...both in the "City" section: the first is where
Levinsky (Allen Ginsberg of course) plays head games with people
on a New York subway car (beginning around p. 376) and the second
is this fantastic/funny/brilliant monologue about marijuana and
cockroaches, (around p. 403). In a way, I'm glad I waited all
this time to finally get around to reading this wonderful novel.
Rating:
Summary: I Love This Book
Review: I had read virtually everything ever written by Jack, excluding
this book, because I'd heard it was his "Tom Wolf" novel and he'd
yet to develop his own style...so after all these years I finally
got around to reading it...and was absolutely overwhelmed by
how great it is...so if you're a Kerouac lover and haven't read
this "family saga" yet, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Other reviewers have described it well, so I'll just mention two
highlights...both in the "City" section: the first is where
Levinsky (Allen Ginsberg of course) plays head games with people
on a New York subway car (beginning around p. 376) and the second
is this fantastic/funny/brilliant monologue about marijuana and
cockroaches, (around p. 403). In a way, I'm glad I waited all
this time to finally get around to reading this wonderful novel.
Rating:
Summary: If there were only six stars to give...
Review: It is rare that I've had the feeling that I didn't want a novel to end -- this one did that to me. No exageration! -- an absolute joy for me to read! Pure magic! I've read "On the Road" a few years back which I liked a lot, but T&C...I don't know, maybe I've changed some over the years to were I appreciate more of Kerouac's passion for life and his sublime sense of existential angst that comes with it. Reading "The Town and The City" was the closest I've gotten with literature of leaving myself and going there. This book is beautiful!
Rating: 
Summary: My Favourite Beat Angel...
Review: The Town And The City tracks the lives of the Martin family (5 sons and 3 daughters) growing up, living loving and discovering themselves, the world and others in the small town of Galloway in Massachusetts in the early 1900's. From the football star, to the lonely scholar, to the forever wandering heartbreaker of a truck driver, Kerouac deals with each of the siblings separately, describing their very different lives and in doing so, gives us the readers, a glimpse into each of their souls. The book can be read as a largely autobiographical account of Kerouac's life, with each of the Martin sons representing alternative parts of himself, his feelings, thoughts and personality. Alternatively, the reader can lose themselves in the lives of the Martin family without concerning themselves with the real or the elaborated. Kerouac reaches the reader with soaring, descriptive writing, which transform the mundane and everyday into feelings and emotions which describe the things you've always thought and felt but could never articulate into words... "He was sick now with a crying lonesomeness, he somehow knew that all moments were farewell, all life was goodbye." Kerouac himself describes the book as, "The sum of myself as far as the written word can go." The great American novel? Possibly, but this book is definately an essential for all Kerouac fans, people who have ever wondered what somebody else was thinking and all those who have raged on into the lonely night looking for an `angelheaded hipster' to give them meaning.
Rating:
Summary: The Great American Novel
Review: This book gets my vote for The Great American Novel edging out F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.
With passionate prose and a realistic events (traits common to first novels in my opinion) Kerouac lays out three main sections that are immediately familiar to an American reader and provides a window into the social development of the United States in a critical period in our history.
The first section is a portrait of growing up and the American family. In the second section the nation goes off to World War II and the protagonist comes of age shedding his innocence. The third section deals with the pyschological aftermath a war has on a society in a more uniquely Kerouac prose of jazz, drugs and the struggle of a "lost generation" to find happiness.
I just can't remember reading any other novel where on every page I couldn't help but thinking this IS the American experience. Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Huck Finn...these are all a slice of American life, but Kerouac gives us the whole apple pie with The Town and the City.
Rating:
Summary: The Father of On the Road.
Review: This is where it all started. Keroauc's first novel is a tough read. Not "tough" as in the crazed style of Dr. Sax, but "tough" as in "meticulous." TTATC has more of a formalized outline than the Kerouac books that followed --ie, On The Road, Dharma Bums, etc. I've read this book was fashioned in the style of Thomas Wolfe, one of Kerouac's hero; hence, the punctilious descriptions and rustic overtones. Nevertheless, it's still a fine story, depicting Kerouac and his families' migration from the milltown of Lowell to the urbanized New York City. As a note for some readers, Kerouac is represents as 3 different characters; the protagonist (Jack) and his 2 brothers.
Rating:
Summary: You can go home again
Review: This semi-autobiographical work covering the life and times of Jack Kerouac before he went "On the Road" comes full circle. It begins in the small town of Galloway, Massachusettes, wends its way to the city of New York, then finally returns to Galloway. Peter Martin has a large, nurturing, and close knit family. As happens in many families, as the children grow older and become young adults, they begin to drift apart from the family unit. Peter, who achieves fame as a college football star, later tires of college and small town life, and falls captive to the lure of New York City, where he meets several bohemian types, two of whom are readily identifiable as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Francis, one of Peter's brothers, gets accepted into Harvard and falls in with a bookish, intellectual sort of man. One of the Martin sisters, Liz, decides to run off with a musician who specializes in be-bop. Added to this equation are family financial woes, a father with a gambling problem, and the start of the second world war, in which a couple of the brothers enlist in the armed services to fight the war against fascism in Europe. I have to admit that I was occasionally put off by Kerouac's tendency to over sentimentalize the events in the life of the Martin family, but what Kerouac has by and large created is a warm and loving portrait of the complex nature of family relationships. The book shows, perhaps surprisingly, that people most often have the most heatedly passionate arguments with those family members whom they most love. What especially stood out for me in this book was Peter's Galloway friendship with Alexander Panos, a particularly sensitive and emotional young Greek-American who wrote poetry. There was also a strange and very funny scene in a New York subway where Martin's Jewish-American friend utilizes a unique method to "spy" on another rider, perhaps foreshadowing the Jack Kerouac that came after _The Town and the City_.
Rating:
Summary: You can go home again
Review: This semi-autobiographical work covering the life and times of Jack Kerouac before he went "On the Road" comes full circle. It begins in the small town of Galloway, Massachusettes, wends its way to the city of New York, then finally returns to Galloway. Peter Martin has a large, nurturing, and close knit family. As happens in many families, as the children grow older and become young adults, they begin to drift apart from the family unit. Peter, who achieves fame as a college football star, later tires of college and small town life, and falls captive to the lure of New York City, where he meets several bohemian types, two of whom are readily identifiable as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Francis, one of Peter's brothers, gets accepted into Harvard and falls in with a bookish, intellectual sort of man. One of the Martin sisters, Liz, decides to run off with a musician who specializes in be-bop. Added to this equation are family financial woes, a father with a gambling problem, and the start of the second world war, in which a couple of the brothers enlist in the armed services to fight the war against fascism in Europe. I have to admit that I was occasionally put off by Kerouac's tendency to over sentimentalize the events in the life of the Martin family, but what Kerouac has by and large created is a warm and loving portrait of the complex nature of family relationships. The book shows, perhaps surprisingly, that people most often have the most heatedly passionate arguments with those family members whom they most love. What especially stood out for me in this book was Peter's Galloway friendship with Alexander Panos, a particularly sensitive and emotional young Greek-American who wrote poetry. There was also a strange and very funny scene in a New York subway where Martin's Jewish-American friend utilizes a unique method to "spy" on another rider, perhaps foreshadowing the Jack Kerouac that came after _The Town and the City_.
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