Portrait Of The Artist

I'm treading on eggshells here because I know some of you love it, but I'm halfway through Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Man and I'm disappointed. Does it get all modernist and raw in the second half or what?

It's overflowing with catholic priests, so where's the child abuse?

Thus far it's a typically genteel, middlebrow literary memoir. Stephen Dedalus is so fuckin' sensitive I want to fuckin' shoot him. David Copperfield is edgier than this.

Joyce writes like the late Victorian aesthete he is.  The prose purls along between flowery meads. This guy  a Lord of language? Really? 

I guess I was expecting it to be the literary equivalent of Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon- and it ain't.