Name: Doctor Sax
ISBN: 9780802130495

Jack Kerouac

Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, is haunted throughout his adolescence by Dr. Sax, a cryptic, hipster phantom.

Faust Part Three

Doctor Sax

Stephanie Midolo

"I'll be damned, the universe disposes of its own evil!"

John Balek

Back in the summer of 2019 I decided to get into Kerouac. I bought copies of On The Road, Dharma Bums, and Dr. Sax. I read On The Road and Dharma Bums in pretty quick succession but kept putting off Dr. Sax, until now.

When reading On The Road and Dharma Bums I felt like an interesting literary prose, associated with the beats, was missing. I'm happy to say that this is not the case with Dr. Sax. The rhythmic cadence and free flow of the prose are what I have been looking for from Kerouac. It is like the literary equivalent to a Jazz song, moving as it pleases and ending when it wants to. Even though this book was written in 1952, the fact that it was published in 1959 feels very fitting; considering how iconic that year is for Jazz music.

Unfortunately the prose wasn't enough for me to really love this book. The narrative is definitely its weakest point. The free flowing and sporadic ethos of Dr. Sax definitely doesn't help when telling a story, at least not here. It's hard to get into the story and the quality of the narrative rises and falls quite often throughout. 

It doesn't help that I haven't been to New England and have no real associations with a lot of what Kerouac is talking about outside of this book. Like other Kerouac books, Dr. Sax suffers from being in between highly descriptive and incredibly vague. 

Out of all of the Kerouac books I've read I found this one to be the least enticing in terms of a narrative and least memorable. I'm going to give Big Sur a chance at some point but maybe Kerouac just isn't for me.

Jack Kerouac called Doctor Sax, the enigmatic figure who haunted his boyhood imagination, 'my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover'. In this extraordinary autobiographical account of growing up in Lowell, Massachussetts, told through his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, he mingles real people and events with fantastical figures to capture the accents, scents, sights and texture of his childhood: playing among the river weeds and railroad tracks, going to church, witnessing life and death on the street corners. Written when he was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico in 1952, Doctor Sax was Kerouac's favourite of all his books: a dark, vivid and magical evocation of a boy's vibrant inner life. 'Kerouac's best book.' Time 'Spooky and tender with stretches of sheer phosphorescent fantasy, Doctor Sax has a vigour and a thirst for life . . . one of the gems of modern literature.' Rolling Stone

Doctor Sax Faust Part Three

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