Really awesome, like a postmodern "On The Road" you'd think was written last year deliberately to subvert the mythic image, when in fact the reverse is true: this book was the first one to use the phrase "beat generation" and was actually published before "On The Road", though it's not as well known. John Clellon Holmes was one of the Beats' inner circle before Jack Kerouac's fame started the beatnik craze. "Go" gives a more balanced portrayal of how that scene felt from the inside than Kerouac's book--for instance, in "Go", Hart Kennedy (Neal Cassady) gets slammed on his whole sexism trip by his ex-wife, and Pasternak (Kerouac) gets tagged for his private conservatism and worshipfuly imitating the posturing of Kennedy (Cassady)--who comes across in this book as a Fonz-like figure, bedazzling all the Columbia intellectual crowd with hipster jargon, dig, man, blow, and smoking tea. "Go" has almost all the same characters as "On The Road"--even one based on Herbert Huncke. Much of the narrative centers around the first "visions" of a character (based on Allen Ginsberg) named Stofsky, and his effect on the social lives of all the others. One interesting angle is when the Huncke character and two other underworlders, a slumped junkie named "Little Rock" who the character Hobbes (based on Holmes) casts as the epitome of "coolness" and a tall redhead named Winnie, move into Stofsky's apartment, using it to stash stolen goods, with increasing obviousness--the Stofsky character sees himself as a prophet subverting social values by hanging around with "the world's doomed and outcast" or some other such Blakean Ginsbergism.
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