Not uncouth at all--I agree entirely with your assessment of the book, and you articulate things that really bothered me but that I hadn't managed to pinpoint (oh god, the self-congratulatory footnotes, yes). (I actually really liked the references to actual books, however--I though it supported its dance on the edge of fact and fiction, which would've been so excellent had Rosenberg been able to manage it.) Alas, as you say, the book seemed like it was for a specific audience but didn't contain anything that would've been actually interesting to that audience--you have to get past a gate that then holds nothing beyond it.