THE END OF THE ROAD

Sick-sick-sick, or maybe just foul, this spends a few weeks with Jacob Horner from the time when he is picked up by a Negro headshrinker who diagnoses his trouble as immobility. After a few treatments, he recommends that Jake get moving as an English teacher and Jake applies at Wicomico State Teachers College where he becomes the household friend of the Morgans,- Joe, who stimulates him intellectually, his wife Rennie- an outdoor type-who eventually becomes involved with him indoors. Rennie finds herself pregnant, threatens suicide; both are lashed by remorse and self-contempt; and Joe, in his desperate attempt to find an abortionist, ends in a bargain with the Doctor and Rennie dies on the table.... The same road that has been travelled with Kerouac, and to an extent Herbert Gold, this is for those schooled in the waste matter of the body and the mind; for others, a real recoil.