Why I was at least half-wrong in yesterday's post on The Car Thief

I'd say about half my post yesterday was wrong. Yes, Alex Hausman, the protag in Theodore Weesner's The Car Thief is a lonely and isolated hero - and I was correct yesterday in noting that it's unusual that he has no friends or even close acquaintances and that he is so socially awkward that he can't even have a simple conversation with a girl - his relationships w/ the three girls who have appeared in the novel thus far (nearly done) are nearly primitive and creepy - stalking them, blurting out to a girl he hardly knows that he loves her, for ex. I think I way overstated the case, however, regarding his lack of sensitivity. He actually is quite a "sensitive" character who feels for others, suffers because of his social exclusion, thinks plaintively about his younger brother now gone from his life, suffers shame and humiliation because of his family poverty and alcoholism, and is strangely driven toward self-destructive actions - notably car theft for no reason other than the thrill and perhaps to give a big f-you to society and to owners of vast [sic], expensive (American - this is Detroit in the 1970s) cars. What I was trying to get at, though, is the paradox of his personality - to others he looks like a cool, detached, maybe a little scary social outcast, a tough, a hood - but with our access to his consciousness - the greatest thing that novels afford us - we can see his complex and distraught personality, we know him in a way that only he knows himself. Some of the jacket copy compares Alex, superficially, with Holden Caulfield, but in fact they have little in common others than late-teen sensitivity. HC is the narrator of his own tale, and there's no way you could imagine Alex telling this tale about himself - if he had the wherewithal to narrate his story and to unfold the complex and sometimes contradictory elements of his personality - he would be an entirely different person. He is not literary, not articulate, not outspoken - and therefore a somewhat rare literary character and a character who is virtually never a credible narrator. It's the author's task, and his brilliance, to make this character, atypical for literature though plentiful in reality (and maybe more typical in movies - in fact at two key moments Alex goes to an all-night cinema and watches Western heroes) come alive, at least to us.