“On The Road:” Masterpiece or Disaster?

Jonathon Menjivarread On the Road as a teenager and, like so many American teens, was completely infatuated by it. His wife, fellow radio producer Hillary Frank, had never read it. They decided to read it together, and while Menjivar is still taken in by all the sex, drugs, and terminally long car journeys, Frank just doesn’t quite see what the fuss is about. Menjivar desperately wants her to see what he saw in it as a kid.

Frank notes the novel’s wild popularity among a certain impressionable age group: “I think I’m too old for On the Road,” she says. “I think maybe it’s just a teen thing.” But not all teenagers are taken in by it. Kim Kelly, the too-cool-for-school character played by Busy Philips on the show Freaks and Geeks, wasn’t impressed: “It went on and on and on like it was written in a total hurry. If I handed in something like this, there’s no way I’d get a good grade on it.”

For Rebecca Kirshner, one of the writers of Freaks and Geeks, “it felt refreshing to say the book stunk because you’re so afraid to criticize great works of art that it’s like: ‘Oh yeah, that Emperor is not wearing clothes.'”

Despite her husband’s evangelizing, Frank stands by her initial reaction that “It just doesn’t feel well written,” that the book contradicts the number one rule of creative writing — show, don’t tell — and that it’s targeted at a male audience. But there is one scene that makes her feel something: when Sal Paradise gets out of the unbearable heat of a car baking under the Mexican sun. “It’s this one moment where I can really feel what’s going on with him. All he can do is give in to the heat and the mosquitos and kind of let the bugs and his blood become one.”

(Originally aired September 14, 2007)