IN THIS 1962 NOVEL, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of bal-ance. Big Sur is a masterpiece of wrenching personal expression in which Kerouac, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."