This book was written in 1944, making it one of the first works by either legendary Beat writer, but it wasn't published until 2008 - a pleasant surprise for fans who had pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it in print.
Being virtually a first work, Hippos bears little resemblance to the later writing styles of either Kerouac or Burroughs. There's none of Kerouac's breathless "bop prosady", none of the nightmarish surreality of Burroughs' solo novels. What you get instead is a straightforward dual account of an event that forged lifelong bonds among the Beat writers: Lucien Carr's murder of their friend David Kammerer. In the novel, which is told in alternating chapters by "Will Dennison" (a character not far removed from Burroughs) and "Mike Ryko" (a sailor not far removed from Kerouac), the strange and still-baffling relationship between the magnetic young Carr ("Phillip") and his obsessed former Scout leader Kammerer ("Ramsey Allen") plays out like a manic tango. The gang's aimless wanderings, wild parties, lofty ambitions, and philosophical musings have an edge of desperation from the very beginning, but the inexplicable conclusion still comes as a harsh blow.
As a cathartic effort and as a first novel, Hippos is superior to most semi-autobiographical works, but I couldn't help wondering if we would have gotten a much different story from an older Kerouac and a wiser Burroughs. The sexual conflict experienced by most, if not all, of the Beats peeks through the veneer of machismo more persistently than in Kerouac's later works, while Burroughs' bisexuality remains firmly masked, leaving the reader to wonder if either man then possessed the insight necessary to grasp such a complex relationship at that point in their lives.
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