Stranger in a Strange Land

I've been reading a lot for work lately, so it took me a few weeks to trudge through this dictionary-sized tome. Robert Heinlein's masterpiece confused the hell out of me. I was on board for the first third of the book, but then the plot went a bit wonky. I say wonky not because I'm a prude or because I was offended, I just couldn't rationally follow Heinlein's train of thought. Of course I understood the critique of modern American mores, riddled with our contradictions and our sometimes absurd lemmingline devotion to organized religion, but I can't quite get how Heinlein went from point A to point B 500-some-odd pages later. Is Michael Valentine Smith a modern incarnation of Jesus? Or an archangel? Or the Martian Hugh Hefner? The version I read was an unabridged edition that included a few hundred more pages than the original. Though a lot of the dialogue is sharp (and borderline obnoxiously chauvanistic at times), it tended to be a bit longwinded, unnecessarily beating a few ideas into the ground. I've managed to intellectually alienate myself from yet another classic novel. ** Sigh ** Maybe I should stick to David Sedaris and James Herriot.