The original novel is receiving rave reviews? Pardon me, but I won't believe that, unless they are reviews written by bots.
Would it have been impossible to give the dude a single interesting hobby, to give him a bit of personality, huh? Playing guitar, programming, 3D modelling, flying drones, anything. But I suppose when an AI writes a story, it will easily go for the tropes, cliches, and precise averages to serve the expectations, so it makes sense he has got nothing.