Re-reading books

At the heart of Sergio De La Pava's large book is a good heist narrative.  Casi, a young and talented public defender in New York City is drawn into a scheme to steal millions of dollars from drug dealers.  Casi and his partner in crime run into difficulties and Casi is hounded by a dirty cop trying to retrieve the money for his criminal employers.
The novel borrows heavily from the themes of Crime and Punishment as Casi tries to justify the theft.  He thinks about the good that he will be able to do with the money and argues with himself that taking this money out of the hands of criminals is a net moral good.  However, rather than subscribing to the same great man theory that Raskolnikov does, Casi and his partner strive for "perfection" in the execution of this crime.
The moral ambiguity of Casi's position and the discussions that he has with his partner rework some of the conventions of crime fiction in an interesting way.  De La Pava humanizes Casi and makes his internal struggle feel true.  Although this is a thoroughly postmodern (post-postmodern?) novel, it does draw upon aspects of naturalism, as well.  In particular, De La Pava wants to re-create the mind-state of the individual involved in the crime, to provide a sort of rationalization if not outright justification.  Much of Casi's process reminds me of the defense in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.  In that novel, a factory owner's son kills a woman who worked in his father's factory and whom he had impregnated.  He murders her by bashing her over the head in a rowboat and dumping her body in a lake.  The unorthodox defense of his actions was to admit that he did intend to kill the woman but that, at the very last second as his arms swung through the air to crush her skull, he no longer wanted to kill her but couldn't pull back to prevent her death.  The defense was not meant to exonerate him, but to create doubt as to the actual intentions.  Casi plays a similar game in which he engages in extensive planning of the heist but constantly reminds himself that he cannot be serious about going through with it.  He allows himself to maintain his sense of morality by denying that he will actually commit any crime and claiming that this whole venture is an exercise in finding "perfection."
Unfortunately, there is a lot more to this novel than the heist narrative.  This novel is packed with quirky characters and philosophical quandaries that tend more to muddy the focus.  Taking a cue from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, this novel also contains meditations on sports (boxing rather than tennis, here) and a preoccupation with television (one character uses a bastardized version of the ontological argument  for the existence of God to attempt to bring Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners into reality).  There is a moment at the end in which one character describes what a naked singularity is to another character.  At a different point in the novel or in a shorter version of this novel, it would have made a greater impact.  But by the time I got to that point, I was swimming in all of the odds and ends of the novel.  The point about the nature of reality was too diluted to be really significant.
I found this novel originally while I was working on my dissertation and read it as a possibility for inclusion there.  Although it was fun to read, I didn't rate it highly enough for inclusion.  I might have mentioned it somewhere, though.  I forget.  This second read was probably more enjoyable because it was less rushed.  I did find myself skipping sections devoted to descriptions of certain boxers' careers.    De La Pava's descriptions of boxing were less vital and urgent than Wallace's use of tennis for basically the same purpose.  I do not know much about either sport and am not particularly interested in either, but Wallace's writing drew me more to tennis based on his passion and ability to clearly communicate that.