Camouflage, Not Shedding Skin

I read the first 60 pages of this book, Shedding Skin by Robert Ward, thinking it was another WOT (waste of time) and then in chapter 15, it all came together and I reread the first fourteen. Initially, I thought the short chapters were not hanging together or leading up to anything. Through page 59, Ward has introduced his picaro, Bobby Ward, and set the stage of his middle class family in Baltimore in the late 50s-early 60s, with Bobby still in high school but a flourishing gang member/delinquent. After graduating, marrying his high school sweetheart and living with her as she becomes more and more uncommunicative, Bobby hits the road. Some of his encounters are highly memorable, especially early on, such as the Stumps of West Virginia. The people on the road get progressively darker and Bobby ends up in the drug culture of Haight Asbury during the height of hippiedom.

It is a picaresque novel full of drugs, rock and roll and sex. His enlightenment, for what it's worth, is canned California EST/yoga boondoggle. While the story is predictable, Ward writes strongly. His picaro companion is Bobby's imaginary childhood friend, Warren, as in "War'n" who acts as his cautionary superego but who cannot stop his eventual deterioration into full blown paranoia.

Already I have decided that the more autobiographical, written in the first person, these picaresque novels are, the less I enjoy them. The message I glean from them is "look at me, use me to justify your being as bad as you want to be because things will eventually work out." Hardly the moral education element I am looking for.