A Joycean novel with plenty of literary references that make us feel smart

Colum McCann's Thirteen Ways of Looking appears to be structured as 13 chapters (someone said to me that they were stories loosely linked, but I don't think that's so - at least thru the first 1/3 of the book they read loke chapters in a novel, slightly out of sequence) each beginning w/ an epigraph from Stevens's famous poem (I bet he paid dearly for the rights). The greatest things about that poem to me is the title - I've never really been able to understand what he's getting at in most of the stanzas, which is true for me re Stevens in general - he like his successors Ashbury et al. is someone I just can't appreciate or understand. The fault is clearly mine, I admit. (I once wrote a parody 13 Ways of Looking at a Cockroach; wish I could remember it.) Anyway, McCann's novel is about an 80+ man living on the upper E Side NYC, pretty wealthy, a retired judge, recently widowed, cared for by a full-time nurse, troubled by his hedge fund philandering son unfortunately named Elliot and worried about peace activist daughter living in Israel. Much of the first chapters, in very close 3rd person, describe the difficulties and humiliations of his day - wearing a diaper at night, needs help walking and washing, etc. - his nurse, from the Caribbean, is lively and devout, misses his wife - Irish born, we get the long and improbably back story of their courtship. We learn - spoiler here tho you'll get it by the 2nd or 3rd chapters - however, that the man, Mendelssohn (btw do they still elect judges in NY?) is murdered: what appears at first to be a Joyce-like account of one day in the life turns subtly into an investigation of a killing, as parts of one of the chapters involve detectives examining surveillance video of the apartment and of the neighborhood (he was killed on the way home from having lunch at a nearby restaurant - not clear why he was walking alone). Son is the probably suspect I would think; wouldn't surprise me if they begin to suspect the nurse, tho. Strengths of the novel thus far are the playful, Joycean/Nabokovian quips and turns of phrase (Mendelssohn is a writer manque, has published a memoir) and the many literary references - which both show us how smart and literate McCann is and incidentally allow his likely readers, i.e., us, to feel smart and literate, too: a mutual admiration society. I seem to remember reading somewhere that McCann himself was a victim of a random assault and was a long time recovering? Some of this novel may involve his working through that trauma; so far, about 1/3 way in, the violence done to Mendolssohn has been discretely kept "off camera."