This book contains two shortish stories, The Subterraneans and Pic, both take place during the 1950s.

'The Subterraneans' is set in San Francisco and the main storyline is of a white man having a sexual relationship with a black woman and its subsequent breakup. The story is part biographical and explores the Bohemian subculture of authors and artists of the time.

Whilst the book does touch on some of the intricacies of interracial relationships, what stands out most is the writing style. There is an almost total lack of punctuation, an entire page consisted pretty much of one or two run-on sentences, paragraphs ran to several pages and there was a very liberal use of brackets, some of which seemed never ending. Couple this with the fact that the ideas bounced around all over the place made this a very hard story for me to follow. I considered stopping on more than one occasion, but I did finally start to get it and continued to see what happened next. Ultimately however, I felt my initial thought was best and I should have thrown in the towel. The main character was a racist, sexist bore with no redeeming features.

'Pic' is a very different, it's the story of a young black orphaned boy who makes a road trip with his older brother initially from North Carolina to New York and from there then on to California following the sudden death of their grandfather.

It is hard to think why a middle-aged white guy would want to try and replicate the voice of black youth but to my middle-aged white male ear he seemed to be relatively successful in doing so. This story has echoes of the author's 'The Road' about it but whilst better than what went before, for me, did not raise the overall book much above the mundane. ( )

This is the perfect example of Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody, in which he imitates, through prose, Charlie Parker's jazz improvisational style. ( )