We recently saw this Avon paperback edition of Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa going for $185 on an auction site. The cover art by Freeman Elliot is great, and of course it’s Kerouac, but we bought a copy several years back for fifteen bucks, and we bet you can do the same if you’re patient. The book is generally framed as being about a heroin addicted Mexican prostitute, but it’s really more about Mexico City at a certain place and time, rendered in archtypal beat style marked by jazzy rhythms, made up words like “hirshing” and “be-wrongled,” bizarre characters, and the merest wisps of plot.
I gaze at her the candlelight flickers on the high cheekbones of her face and she looks as beautiful as Ava Gardner and even better like a Black Ava Gardner, a Brown Ava with long face and long bones and long lowered lids—Only Tristessa hasn’t got that expression of sex-smile, it has the expression of mawkfaced down-mouthed Indian disregard for what you think about its own pluperfect beauty. Not that it’s perfect beauty like Ava, it’s got faults, errors, but all men and women have them and so all women forgive men and men forgive women and go their own holy ways to death.
There’s not much room for ambivalent opinions there. People tend to either love Kerouac or not be able to stand him. Critics cite his problematic beliefs (not actually relevant in a discussion of writing skill) and endlessly elliptical ways of describing not much happening. Truman Capote said Kerouac didn’t write—he typed. But we like him. His writing shouldn’t work, but for us it does because we’re willing to suspend impatience and let his uniquely observational voice let us see the world through his eyes. Plus, some of it reminds us of our own lives. Is Tristessa Kerouac’s best? Perhaps not, but it’s short and we think it’s worth a read.
