Grooking in Lowell

DOCTOR SAX (245 pp.)--Jack Kerouac --Grove Press (clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75).

The decade's most celebrated banger of mystical ashcans has written a fictional account of his childhood, and surprisingly, while the lad he describes is no Penrod, neither is he Little Boy Beat. Jack Duluoz, the author's alter-Kerouac, is exuberantly profane and comfortably delinquent--a kind of city-bound Tom Sawyer who at one point seems ready to go rafting down New England's flood-swollen Merrimack River on a henhouse roof.

But like Sawyer, young Duluoz is a fair-weather rebel, and he generally rambles home in time for dinner. The book, some of its pages all but yellowed with nostalgia, is an elegy to the warm, safe smells of a tenement kitchen and the dark mysteries of a city neighborhood.

Yakking in the Blue. At the outset, Kerouac warns what he is up to: "The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street. Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself 'Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J.'s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better--and let your mind off yourself in this work.' " Despite its irritating quality, the formless formula works well enough in evoking the often simultaneous boyhood moods of scorn, fear, sentimentality, barefootedness and gleeful obscenity. Writes Kerouac at wild random: "A young and silly dove is yakking in the blue, circling the brown and slushy river with yaks of pipsqueak joy," and "the mystery which I now see hugens, huger, into something beyond my Grook.''

"Grook," the keyword of the novel, always refers to something ominously exciting, not fully understood, worthy of a boy's wonder and solemn respect. Dr. Sax. the hawk-faced, silent, evil-battling spook whom Jack Duluoz invents (and then sees, fearfully, in every dark doorway), gets from place to place by grooking. Dr. Sax plays poker incessantly, has a high, fiendish laugh ("Mwee hee ha ha ha"). And when his stalking of the evil Great World Snake makes it necessary, he pulls a rubber boat out of his slouch hat, pumps it up and paddles across the Merrimack.

Turf in the Tenement. Perhaps the book's most appealing episode is the horse-racing fantasy--for Jack Duluoz, like any right-thinking Massachusetts twelve-year-old, is a track addict. In the Duluoz tenement, on dark winter mornings, Jack scribbles out racing forms, plays the call to colors on the Victrola, stages elaborate handicap races with marbles ("I owned that great Repulsion, also personally rode the beast, and trained him . . . also ran the Turf, was Commissioner, Track Handicapper, President of the Racing Association, Secretary of the Treasury").

Pinball prose, grookish goofiness and all, Kerouac's book is a pleasant boyhood novel. Doctor Sax, which was written in 1952, comes from the apparently bottomless hopper that the author had filled before his bestselling On the Road was published. Perhaps because it contains no such adult concerns as marijuana, Zen Buddhism or women to dull his exuberance, it is Kerouac's best book.

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