Tedious, nauseating, overblown: why it’s best to leave this ‘classic’ book in the past

For a long time, this book was unpickupable.

I first fell asleep with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road somewhere in chapter one, sometime in my mid-twenties. Friends had exhorted the brilliance of a revolutionary novel encapsulating the enthusiasm of youth breaking out from home and taking on the world, but having grown up with wide and long stretches of bitumen in regional Australia I preferred my hitch-hiking novels to be more guidelike and galactical. Hours and hours behind the wheel getting nowhere in particular was something I wanted to escape from, not to. Bring on the Vogons.

After dropping off to sleep, the book dropped off the bed and was forgotten about. It was discovered some months later in the throes of a breakup.

The hype surrounding the novel is wildly overblown and at times vaguely toxic.Credit:

Maybe it would have been better to read on the rebound than bingeing on biographies of Oscar Wilde, but for a long time I couldn’t shake Kerouac’s association with that particular emotional maelstrom. And then my copy disappeared for good.

What would have been Kerouac’s 100th birthday earlier this year brought gushing tributes and a rush of think pieces about the novel’s lasting influence, ranging from the intimate and personal to the broad and cultural. The sense of freedom it provoked immediately after publication in 1957 wasn’t something I had felt in the first few pages. It struck me as that most tedious of literary endeavours: a writer writing a book about a writer writing a book. I was being unfair, and given it had inspired so many for so long it seemed right to give it another go.

Now married with children at 38 (and therefore roughly 20 years too old for it) I once again squeezed into the passenger seat with Sal Paradise (a stand-in for the author) for five road trips with or tangential to his friend Dean Moriarty (modelled on Neal Cassady). At least I think that’s what the book is: a journey of ecstasies and frustrations, humour and heartache, from an era before COVID tests and QR codes when petrol cost less than the car you were pouring it into. It’s about the trips, man, in more ways than one.

Trying to get into the first few chapters while a toddler wriggled all over me on a plane, it seemed like a meaningless list of places I’d never been and people I didn’t care about. I put it down and zoned out to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which has all the same problems except is set in space and looks gorgeous.

The novel came with me to Thailand during a month-long pilgrimage to see family and friends, and after two years of restrictions and lockdowns Kerouac’s joy in exploration and adventure was touching. “… because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

What’s not to love about a passage like that? Then, on the same page, Kerouac describes “not an orgy but just a New Year’s party with frantic screaming and wild radio music. There was even a Chinese girl.” Huh?

Sam Riley in the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.

One paragraph, later on, serves up both the exquisite – “Alone in my eternity at the wheel” – and the nauseating – “the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world”. As liberated as the novel is on matters of sex, drugs and jazz music, it is liberal in its racism and sexism. Sure, the world has changed since the late 1950s, but was it ever really acceptable to be that lecherous towards such young girls?

I finish part two as we come in to land at Udon Thani in Thailand’s north-east. Sal leaves Dean and his girlfriend Marylou saying no one cared whether they would see each other again. I share the feeling and put the book aside for a week or more in favour of scoffing sticky rice, raiding lychee farms and drinking with ageing communist rebels. The children pick mulberries in the yard. On the road, two cows wander in front of our hire car in quick succession, while dogs and motorbikes chase each other and ageing dictators peer down from corflutes.

All too soon we’re heading south – me back to Australia with a child’s heavy head on my lap and Sal to Mexico with sweaty, bug-stained T-shirts. I can’t shake the impression that Dean Moriarty is Mr Chatterbox on drugs and alcohol, but his wild optimism is either growing on me or wearing me down.

After a drive from Sydney to Melbourne, I polish off the short last section. I feel a little like Sal Paradise staring at his charismatic, frustrating friend Dean Moriarty as they part. My feelings towards the novel have improved from irrational hatred all the way up to “mixed”, but the hype surrounding it is wildly overblown and at times vaguely toxic. I’m happy to be heading in a different direction.

The Verdicts

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• Underrated: Twenty years on from Avril Lavigne’s Let Go, it’s time to agree that mall-punk is the best music
• Overrated: Why you should vote 1 against political satire
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