The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared

I must say that I thought I was in for some belly laughs. A great title and simple prose. Quirky characters. So I read with great anticipation. I am still anticipating.
What on earth was all this about? It was clearly laughs but for me the laughs were few and far between. If it was a history lesson, it was surely a warped one. And if we were meant to take from it a philosophy of life, it was disappointing.
This Voltaire, travelling thin. Remember Candide and its philosophy went like " All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds".
That motto is replaced here by something like " It is what is and what ever will be will be". I take it as a fatalistic view of life Simple Allan advises presidents and comes up trumps; he gets in sticky situations and comes up clean; even murder doesn't matter.
Apart from the centenarian, there are various crooks and characters, I had difficulty identifying with them or caring about them. The author invites us to take this as absurdism but the essence of absurdism is a sense of nihilism, thats life's like that so don't take it seriously. But the trouble is that this work is not like life at all. Instead its more like a children's book, with out any moral sense.
The only bang in it is courtesy of The Karlsson Explosive Company.