Well, it appears On The Road is no longer my "Most Disliked Critically Acclaimed" book, for The Room has stolen the title. To paraphrase Truman Capote's review of the former, the latter is "less than typing".

I don't know how anyone praises this rambling stream of consciousness that reads like an unedited first draft pulled from the trash bin then thrown back in it once its author sobered up.

If you're looking 12-page violent and explicit-to-the-point-of-fantasy gang rape or a 4-page scene on squeezing a pimple, then pick this up. But it's no more haunting than some incel rant on 4chan (nor better written).

But it's not just the content. The writing style is shit. The (anti-)structure is shit. It's all shit. Maybe people in the 70s thought half-page line indents and ALL CAPS and an abandonment of punctuation was art. That this book is edgy or daring because it's so unconventional. It's not. It's just bad.

I only finished reading it in order to lambast it fairly.