You can tell a book is going to be shite when there's pages and pages of introductions, trying to big up the author as something they're not, so maybe the reader will feel like they just don't understand the book, when really it's just a terrible book that some people have decided is "art".
Thankfully I skipped the majority of the misplaced praise and could see for myself how crap the book is.

A brilliant introduction, a few more scattered bits of intelligence, dirty words that make it all original and controversial, lots of boring ramblings, tedious writing... frustrating book. Men who think their penises are the best thing that ever happened to this world might find some empathy for this dude and have a deeper appreciation for his life. I for one find it hard to care about his problems and his majestic dick. My two stars are for the deceitful first page that lured me in.

Michael Chabon, in Manhood for Amateurs, about the work of Henry Miller:

"Henry Miller, I think I should begin, was my great literary hero from the age of sixteen to about nineteen, and on the assumption that you haven´t recently dipped into Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn or Black Spring or the three volumes that make up The Rosy Crucifixion I will summarize the work – and undersell it – according to my purpose here: it´s basically one long novel about the exaltation and despair, in New York and Paris, of a little shit named Henry Miller. The Henry Miller presented in the fiction is a drunk, a cad, a loser; an angry, misogynistic fuck-up with delusions of grandeur, oceanic ambition, lamentable habits of personal grooming, and the profound detestation for money and the material world that only the born cadger can maintain.‘All I ask of life,’ as the narrator of Tropic of Cancer approvingly quotes his friend the novelist Van Norden, ‘is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.’ For a few crucial years that was my own secret little-shit motto - or so, at least, I told myself.
[...]
The Miller hero does what he wants, when he wants to, whether it makes any sense or not, even when doing so may hurt or bring sorrow to another. He is not merely contradictory like the rest of us but doggedly, programmatically so. He is both a clown, a cuckold, capable of lacerating self-mockery, and a pompous bastard, self-important and ‘big-souled.’ He is capable of soaring transports of fellow feeling and the most petty acts of impotent revenge. Most of all, he treats the people around him, friends, enemies, lovers, with a cheerful, even lyric, contempt. They are the matter of his work, the furnishing of his dreams and nightmares, the object of his fixations, the characters in the tawdry circus-cum-back-alley opera of his life. If they are women, they are his cunts."