I think it was Miller just giving into his worst tendencies. Like Sim, there is a period where you can write off the crazy as just being eccentricities but then, especially with Sim, the minor digression becomes the major theme of the work and I just had to walk away.
The long, tedious Fitzgerald stuff I can deal with, but his later openness about his wacky political beliefs colors all the previous work for me; like, I can start to see what he was actually trying to say with some of it, and I can't unsee it or substitute my own perceptions from the first time I read it. It's pretty much ruined for me, except to thumb through Gerhard's backgrounds.
