This book is a decent sophisticated piece of literary fiction smashed together with a sophmoric piece of leering juvenile erotica. The part of the book that centers on the protagonist is interesting and philosophically compelling; the antagonists, however, are so broadly drawn as to be farcical, and the author makes the greatest mistake of fiction writers: His antagonists have no socially redeeming qualities. In fact, the level of their corruption is so over the top as to make them totally repellant. In addition, the book needed a good editor. I quickly lost track of all the errors in spelling, in punctuation, and in use of homonyms, not to mention the characters who had their names spelled multiple ways in different parts of the book, and the quirky capitalization. Add in poor syntax, and you've got an amateur book with poor production quality. Plus, the protagonist was a 23 year old graduate student in 2004, who made almost all his pop culture references from baby boomer pop culture that most of the current generation would be totally unfamiliar with. Even worse, his friends and students, also his age or younger, seemed not to be lost by them. This is totally unrealisitic, and the author needed to do a bit more research on the slang and the pop culture of the generation he was writing about. Overall, I don't think I could recommend this book, and if you were to pick it up, I highly recommend skipping over most of the book, and focusing on the philosophical arguments. In short, this author should have simply written a non-fiction book to put his philosophical ideas out to the public. ( )