Even though this one didn't prominently feature a pedophilic lead like _Door into Summer_, I think I still like the other book more. This just didn't quite work for me, and I think it's because the narrator was just too bland. Not angry enough, I guess, and sort of hard to accept certain elements of his personality, like his cabin in the woods and his alter ego as a cat loving writer, when he goes to great lengths at the start to tell us he's a lunkhead.

Still, I think this is the solution, for anyone who tells you that books aren't freighted with ideology-- just give them some dated pulp and ask them to repeat that to your face. Maybe that's a new characteristic of literature, something that separates it from genre writing: it makes the attempt to appear without ideology.