On the Road and looking for an exit

I don't know exactly when I bought this book, but it had to be after 1983 as I have a 25th anniversary edition. Probably after going to Reed College and having my friend, Jools, rave about Jack Kerouac and The Beats.
I remember reading an essay about rereading books by the critic Sven Birkerts. I think he specifically wrote about rereading On the Road. He ruefully notes that it isn't nearly as good or compelling as when he read it as teen. Since I never read this book in my "youth", I cannot comment on Birkerts' assessment, but I know that I was not impressed by this book at all.
The narrators seems like dopes, racists, and misogynists. Their adulation of "the Negro" is terribly objectifying and orientalizing. They came off sounding like privileged white boys who wish they could somehow be black! Some of their language and dialogue is so funny, especially the whole discussion of "It." The scenes where they apparently experience these moments of transcendence come off as faux mysticism.
Still Kerouac does have some narrative skill. His brief mediation on death (103) hints at the restless longing many of us have as we feel our youth slipping away. However, I cannot help thinking that the narrator as an older, but ultimately less interesting and less compelling version of Holden Caulfield
Czar