The idea to read this book came in the form of a birthday present. I had just finished reading a book by Bill Morgan detailing the lives of the Beat Writers, which is probably what sparked the idea for the gift. It's nice to have friends that pay attention.
Without giving too much away the book tells the story of Wesley Martin and Bill Everhart. Both characters seem to be based on different halves of the real Jack Kerouac. The free-spirited Wesley is the classic Kerouac nomad, a traveling man living every day for its own worth and seeking high adventure where he can find it. You see this type of character in most of his later works, and in the living flesh of his real life acquaintances (enter Neal Cassady) Wesley rolls into town from the docks, having pissed away his earnings on booze and women he finds himself in a diner where he meets Bill. Bill is the other side of what a 20 year old Kerouac might have truly seen himself to be; a burning intellect, and in the novel a young professor at Columbia University. Bill has lived the life of theory with little hands-on life experience. He is easily seduced by Wesley's stories and experiences and wants to live a portion of them for himself. The pair embark on a small adventure, which leads Bill to follow Wesley on his next merchant marine voyage to Greenland. Because the story is so short I won't give anything more away.
I recommend this book for Kerouac lovers. This one had slipped past my radar growing up, and I wasn't sure why at first. I found out that this was published in 2011, long after my original run at the 'beat' writers. To my surprise this surfaced and has rekindled my love of Kerouac specifically.
The book was largely criticized for being too armature, a young Kerouac's attempt to be the writer he dreamed of, but wasn't quite yet. When I read those reviews I laughed...simply becasue they were right. But instead of giving the book a poor review becasue of that , I found that I was celebrating the book for those reasons. This is a young Jack Kerouac writing about his experiences (although short lived) in the merchant marines, and what's there not to love about getting a taste of his style and technique in their earliest recorded stages? Perhaps you truly need to be a fan of his later works (which I am) to fully appreciate a glance at the roots. We might all too often see Kerouac as a literary force that simply just came to be, with no visible roots upon which he based his evolution. The Sea is My Brother shows us that he did indeed have to earn his dues before becoming the author we know him as today through his later and more popular works.
This book in this picture is 216 pages long and it took me one day to read.
On my sliding scale I give this book a solid 10/10. Perhaps I am being nostalgic and ranking one of my favorite authors too high, however, truly I feel this book was a perfectly written first novel. It told me a perfect story, a VERY light read, that gave me exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. I was very happy to have finally read it after all the years it sat in the Kerouac estate unpublished and waiting for me.
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