On & On, the Road

LONESOME TRAVELER (183 pp.) -- Jack Kerouac-- McGraw-Hill ($4.50).

Gyrating motion is the substitute for plot or theme in the novels of Jack Kerouac, the beats' most beamish boy. His characters ride a reeling carousel equipped with stolen cars instead of painted tigers, and to the reader they are mostly blurred faces. The trouble is that when the whirling stops, the faces are still blurred and the conversation still pointless-jointless. A happy solution has occurred to Author Kerouac; he has written a volume in which the whirling is continuous and the characters negligible -- in other words, a travel book.

Lonesome Traveler is a title that needs a banjo accompaniment, and so does the book itself -- a collection of short pieces about the wandering years in which he ambled through the experiences that look so impressive when summarized on the back of a dust jacket. Kerouac is daffy and exuberant as he tells of working as an apprentice brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, flunkeying on a freighter from Oakland to New Orleans, blasting exaltedly on O(pium) with a Mexican narcotics wholesaler. But the author is not wholly a praiser of his own beat-romantic past. He admits to behavior so much worse than square that it is cubic, or even tesseractical. He confesses, for instance, to paying his way to Europe and rubbernecking around the Louvre. Rembrandt and Franz Hals, he reports, are great.

The book's best piece is about railroading -- how to set a freight car's brake and then, perilously, slip blocks of wood under the wheels; the arrogant, slow-motion skill of well-paid oldtimers in clean overalls; the trainman's contempt for the placid, nonrolling civilian world. The author's stream-of-consciousness gibberish is fairly effective as he tells of being summoned at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early run ("I wake up ... in the mouth of the night and there everything knows that I have no mother, and no sister, and no father and no bot sosstle, but not crib, and I get up and sit up and says 'Howowow?' and he says 'Telephone?' " There is, after all, a character described in Lonesome Traveler. It is Kerouac, full of wonder, wind and wow -- as always, his own best invention.

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