The net is theory and under it is what actually happens. Jake believes in theory but manages to get everything consistently wrong though superficially logically reasonable. This is not because he is stupid, but because he is driven by his emotions, as are all the other characters except perhaps Dave and Lefty. Dave is exempt because he is a philosopher and a Jew. Lefty's emotions are in sync with his political leftist theory.

Hugo tells Jake that his problem is that he's always trying to make sense of things when truth lies in blundering on. Even a novel, especially one written in the 1950s, needs some sort of narrative organization to allow us to digest the blundering on of the characters. At the end, Jake believes he's ready to begin a writing career and all the loose ends have been tied up. Still, I'm left with a pleasant blundering on feeling.