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I have always struggled with Doctorow's writing and this wasn't an exception (see that it took me over a year to make it through).

The story is so "on the nose". It doesn't lead you along, helping you understand through example and metaphor. It just drags you along a whirlwind tour of hopeful progressive political thought experiments. Most of my favorite fiction teaches similar concepts (we can choose to just care about/for people, we can choose to abandon the old narrative and live a better future), but does so with nuance and impact.

When I started to enjoy the book is accepting that it's a hopeful tour of progressive ideas, more like a summary of a bunch of young people's online "what-if" rants. It's legitimately useful in that sense because it places those ideas in to a narrative and helps the reader find application for them.

One problem I had is that there is a famed politician who cut through all the red tape and enabled the whole US to make progress again. Yeah, she did that by re-democratizing government, buuuut its still a depiction of a political personality cult and that feels icky in an otherwise "power to the people" story.

The other main issue I have is the hopefulness that technology will save us. Don't get me wrong, the story actually focuses on technologies used in meaningful reasonable ways (heat pumps and sea walls) instead of fantastical schemes (geoengineering such as reflective atmospheric gases to reduce sunlight reaching earth). The story also balances the technology with a human element. Still, it wrests technology out of the hands of capitalism in a way that I struggle to find satisfying or aspirational.

I don't have much of a conclusion, but if you go in to this book looking to enjoy a romp through modern progressive ideology, without getting stuck on the details or the rather 2D characters, you'll find it to be an interesting projection of where we could go from here.