I kept reading in the hope that something fascinating would happen. Certainly, the potential was there. This book was written in the Vietnam-traumatized late sixties, is staged in 1978, and proposed nuclear armageddon by 2000. But it also anticipated see-through clothing (for women only), and short-term contract marriages (which the protagonist thought would result in a higher murder rate by scorned women), and a terrifying coup by black revolutionaries in Chicago. Oh, this story has not aged well.
The book spent three-quarters of the time getting ready to go to the bleak future, and nothing happened when it got there. The action had already taken place, and was described in summary. And worst of all, there was a terrible and strangely pointless out-of-left-wing reveal in the second to last chapter that the main character is, gasp, a black man. To make it worse, that man was named Chaney.
What was the point of all this? I don’t know. And that’s the problem.
The tangential lesson: a strong point of view can make writing great. The other, more horrific lesson is that reveals are bad.