A novel with so many strengths, but some shortcomings as well: The Volunteer

Many aspects of Salvatore Scibona's 2019 novel, The Volunteer, impressed me enormously, notably the range of his style (some passages of reflection and observation are moments of great beauty, and his many scenes in dialog are crisp, witty, and surprising) as well as the tremendous breadth of his knowledge (or at least seamless research), including his intimate knowledge about military history and procedures, underworld lingo, high finance, engineering, farming and ranching, medical matters, security measures - this list could go on, but point made. So what is this novel about, exactly? We follow a deeply troubled family through 4 generations of men, though most of the focus is on the 2nd generation, the Volunteer (named Vollie, though he goes by several aliases across this novel): We see, not in chronological order, his childhood on a farm or ranch with older, difficult parents; he enlists in the Marines and serves several tours in Vietnam, culminating in his year-long imprisonment in a Viet Cong tunnel in Cambodia. When they release him his entire military history has to be erased, as the U.S. will not acknowledge incursions into Cambodia; he's later recruited by a dubious intelligence officer to go undercover and do surveillance on an elderly man living (or may no longer living) in Queens; this leads to a double murder, from which V. flees, drives x-country, begins a new life, settling with a woman living in an abandoned hippie-ranch (which had been run by V's closest friend, who disappears from the novel) and raising a child, who will become V's son de facto, a troubled young man named Elroy - who enters the military and fathers a son in Estonia, whom he abandons at an airport - and we ultimately follow this young man through his college years (this part set 10 years in the future). Yikes! There's so much narrative incident, all of it quite vivid and relatively easy to follow despite the complexity - but the novel seems to be missing something at its heart: There's a lot happening, but really no plot per se, despite many opportunities to explore crises and character growth. To cite just one example: Elroy abandons his son in a German airport. Who would do this and why? We never get an answer to that, other than that E is troubled and has been arrested several times for violent crimes. Or another example: Volly spends nearly a year trying to find his quarry - maybe living, maybe dead - in Queens and when he does he almost immediately leads an agent to the elderly man's bedside; why is he surprised that agent kills the man (+ an innocent bystander)? In other words, many things happen in this novel, but they do not derive from the actions and ideas of the central character. He suffers, he survives, but does he learn and change? He feels guilt and remorse about several events in his life, but we don't actually see him interact with others. In essence, the novel is like a long road trip through time (there are several road trips through space in this narrative as well), but the stakes are generally low and the insight limited. I would read more by Scibona, but this novel - at +400 pages - delivered less than promised, of at least less than I'd hoped for.