Is The Confidence-Man worth reading?

To see if there was anything I was missing, I read R.W.B. Lewis's Afterword in my old pb edition of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. Lewis taught at Yale in the old gentlemanly days of that regal English Department, and you can see that from his essay - extremely well-crafted and full of fine turns of phrase and rich allusion to figures from literature and mythology, as well as some gentle references to then-contemporary Melville scholarship. He definitely makes that case that there's a design to this novel - not just a series of random encounters between the con man, in various guises, and his dupes but the novel is moving toward to Christian examination of sin v. charity, with the con-man as a Satanic figure, in particular modeled on Milton's Satan. He notes aptly that the novel is difficult to read, but then suggests it's actually easy to re-read, which may be so: once you have the design in mind you're not struggling so hard to figure out who's who, which the con-man and which the rube. That said, to reverse one of my favorite passages in Eliot: we have had the meaning and missed the experience. It's one thing to dissect this novel or any novel and tell us what the author, possibly, meant and what meaning we can derive from the work; it's another to say the novel is worth your time and investment. Despite Lewis's claims for the novel's satiric and ironic (a much over-used critical term form the 1950s and 60s) value, I never found myself amused or surprised, just belabored. It's kind of funny to read his footnote summaries of some of the criticism of the day as well: The C-M is based on Hindu mythology? Really? As noted in previous post, there is reason to read the C-M to get a more complete picture of Melville's world view and personal struggles and disappointments, just as we read the darker works of Twain (noted yesterday, and Lewis picks this up, too) to understand his mind - but neither The Mysterious Stranger nor The Confidence-Man would have endured on its own had it not superceeded a literary masterpiece. In other words, it's a book for grad students and scholars, but unlikely to appeal to most other readers.