Kerouac's sound starts up in his first novel, The Town and the City, and anyone who grew up with or remembers the sentimental music of the 1930s will recognize what he is doing. The New England nights and days of his childhood and youth are orchestrated with slow violins, to which sound the children whose lives he chronicles are stirred into awareness as the stars dip down and slow breezes sweep along diminishing strings towards soft music on a farther shore. It is the considerable achievement of the novel that Kerouac is able to sustain the note of profound sentimentality his style conveys even as he is tracing, with remorseless intelligence, the downfall of the New England family…. (p. 65)

The jazz is in the continuity in which each episode [in On the Road] tells a separate story—variations on the holiness theme. And it is in the remarkably...