PenguinScreenshots from the iPad version of “On the Road.”Gasps went up last week when a digital edition of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land” knocked Marvel Comics out of the top spot on the list of top-grossing book apps for the iPad.
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But wait! Now here comes Jack Kerouac tailgating right behind, looking for a similarly exalted place to park a sleek new iPad app based on his classic 1957 novel “On the Road.”
The “amplified edition” of “On the Road,” released today by Penguin Classics, certainly comes tricked out with more fancy bells and whistles than a BMW M5. It includes the full text of the novel, of course, with expandable marginal notes giving historical and biographical background. An interactive map traces Kerouac’s three real-life cross-country road trips, with links to relevant passages from the novel. There are never-before-seen photos, rare audio clips of Kerouac reading from an early draft, previously unreleased documents from his publisher’s archive, and a slide show of international covers showing how the book has been marketed from Argentina to Ukraine to China.
Pretty much the only thing missing is the chance to hear the novel read aloud by that sexy-voiced woman from your GPS.
It would be tempting to see this as the dawn of a golden age of the serious literary app, though all classics may not benefit equally from lavish multimedia amplification. As Laura Miller wrote recently in Salon, “The Waste Land” has the advantage of being both familiar and difficult, appealing to the kind of older readers who “feel they could have gotten a lot more out of the poem in college if they’d only been a little less distracted by the temptations that assail freshman English majors” — and who are willing to shell out $14, about 14 times the price of Angry Birds, for a second chance. By contrast, pretty much the only real impediment to any ordinary teenager’s enjoyment of “On the Road” is unfamiliarity with the terms “jalopy” and “tea” (though a note on 1950s drug slang helps with that last one).
The “On the Road” app — priced at $12.99, the same as the regular e-book edition (it rises to $16.99 on July 2) — was prepared with help from the Beat scholars Bill Morgan and Howard Cunnell, though it has a populist, unscholarly feel. Some of the notes embedded in the text give a helpful run-down of the real-life people and places behind the novel, sometimes with photographs that deepen the period flavor. But often they merely explain the obvious or the dubiously relevant, as in notes defining the G.I. Bill or giving the plot of “Fidelio” (which Sal Paradise sees in Denver), or confiding that a minor character named Denver B. Doll was based on a teacher who befriended the young Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty. (You’ll have to look in the section dealing with the novel’s publishing history to learn that Kerouac thought the man would be “tickled” by the tribute, though he still took basic precautions to prevent a libel suit.) It would be easy enough to ignore endnotes of this sort in your average classroom-ready critical edition (though none in fact exists for “On the Road”). But on the iPad, it’s hard to resist tapping on the blue bars in the margin and pulling yourself out of the story Kerouac meant to unfurl as seamlessly as the 120-foot scroll of Japanese art paper he first typed it on.
It’s also hard to resist the cool interactive map comparing the routes of Kerouac’s own three cross-country road trips, garlanded with corresponding passages from the novel (though I personally would have loved a feature that would help readers plan their own re-enactment, perhaps with some advice from Jane and Michael Stern on where to find the best buttermilk biscuits in Dubuque and other legal mood-enhancing substances along the route).
The app’s collection of documents from the archives of Viking, which published the original hardcover, gives insight into the intense corporate efforts to market this most freewheeling of American novels — which surely holds lessons for those selling souped-up e-books today. Here, you find an exchange of letters between Kerouac and his editor, Malcolm Cowley, about how to deal with obscenity issues, as well as a facsimile of a previously unreleased internal memorandum saying the book had great fascination and sales potential despite not being “a great or even a likeable book.” (That last part was penciled out.) There’s also Kerouac’s own sketch for an “appealing commercial cover,” showing all the cities visited in the novel cheek by jowl along a single straight road, under the heading “A Modern Prose Novel by John Kerouac.”
Still, despite early enthusiasm at Viking, no one saw “On the Road” as the endlessly shape-shifting juggernaut it remains 54 years after Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty first hit the highway. In a letter about the marketing plan, Viking’s publicity director, Patrician McManus, told Kerouac, “I forewarn you that it will require active work on your part, and maybe nothing to show for it.”