This is exactly the type of novel that will get under most readers' skin (look at the top rated reviews here); it is conceited, smug, and unabashedly masculine in the Updike/Roth sort of vein. It's about an upper class (at least in lifestyle and education if not in actual wealth) dude willing to blow up his life and hurt the women in it just because he can't deal with things responsibly. I'm choosing to read this as my own chosen diet of guilty pleasure. I loved it! I love the writing, how smarmy and caustic and funny it is. I don't want this review to be taken as some sort of "the canon/masculinity is under fire" type thing, because I don't believe that; I do think that our shifting expectations of literature warrant a discussion, though. This is the exact type of novel that would have gotten heaps of praise in the 60s or 70s, and even if it is self-conscious of what type of bourgeois thing it is aping, it still is the thing that I wouldn't necessarily want to proclaim from the rooftops as one of my favorite books of 2018.