BY DWIGHT GARNER

"  O n   T h e   R o a d  "   b y   J a c k   K e r o u a c

Michael Chabon: The Swimmer by John Cheever Jeffrey Eugenides: Portrait of a Lady by Henry James Mary Gaitskill: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo Denis Johnson: Fat City by Leonard Gardner Cynthia Joyce: Mating by Norman Rush Gary Kamiya: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Mignon Khargie: Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee John Le Carré: Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse Laura Miller: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Joyce Millman: Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris Joyce Carol Oates: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Reynolds Price: A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone Andrew Ross: The Castle by Franz Kafka Scott Rosenberg: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Ian Shoales: The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney Joan Smith: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Amy Tan: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Mary Elizabeth Williams: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Cintra Wilson: Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving

the problem with being a Fabulous Yellow Roman Candle -- to borrow Jack Kerouac's famous term for those "who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time" -- is what you might politely call the fizzle-out factor. Kerouac fizzled out worse than most. Like nearly all of the Beat writers, he published groaning loads of what the critic Seymour Krim once called "raw junk" under a "Kotex flag of liberation." Wander far from his better-known work and it's easy to find yourself waist-deep in a literary Big Muddy of overcharged prose and undercharged thinking. But that said, Kerouac's "On the Road" retains for me its galloping, yea-saying potency. It certainly is the book that Changed My Life (groan), even if I feel a little hesitant about admitting it. (It'd be far more glamorous to single out something by Genet or Conrad.) But then I was probably right smack in the middle of Kerouac's core constituency -- a fat pimply kid in suburbia who simply had no idea, until this book fell into his hands, that literature could promise quite this much. As a hapless young writer, too, I can testify to his emancipating example. As Thomas Pynchon said about "On the Road" in his introduction to his collection of short fiction, "Slow Learner": "It was actually OK to write like this! Who knew?" I haven't reread "On the Road" for probably five years, but whole sections of it -- sections full of an almost Whitmanesque ecstasy -- pop to mind unbidden. His unfussy description of Dean Moriarty, for example, captures the essence of a uniquely American character in the way a more precise writer probably never could: ... to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to make a living and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand 'Yesses' and 'That's Rights.' My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry -- trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent -- a sideburned hero of the snowy West. Was Jack Kerouac a great writer? Probably not. Will I reread him more gratefully than most Great Writers I can think of? Absolutely. Dwight Garner is the book editor of Salon.