Does the excellent writing get in the way of the tenuous plot?

No question Salvatore Scibona is an excellent writer; open any page at random in his recent novel, The Volunteer, and you'll find great topical description (scenes vary and cover an enormous range, from the below-ground tunnels and torture chambers in Cambodia to Queens street life to a x-country jaunt along the highways and back roads of the U.S. - and many others) and excellent quirky, sometimes enigmatic dialog. Also I'm blown away (now about half-way through this novel) by the range of his knowledge - military history especially, but also incidental knowledge about so many topics, medical, scientific, legal, illegal. Yet for all of this I have to wonder: Does the excellence in his style get in the way of his plotting, character development, narrative? At the halfway point the 3 main characters of his narrative at last come into focus together, but I'm a little puzzled about the whole arc of the story; sometimes he writes so well that his prose obscures rather than lightens what he's trying to convey. Or, put another way, sometimes he writes so well that we gloss over the improbabilities of his story line. For one example, there's a scene in which the protagonist, Vollie (aka Tilly, plus other pseudonyms and nicknames) witness as shooting and himself takes a bullet to the foot - and then he takes off. Is that possible? Would the police investigation of a murder scene not pick up some information about his presence? Could he really just walk into a VA hospital with this kind of bullet wound and get medical treatment (for free?) and not provoke any kind of investigation? Well, maybe - and that's why I'll read along - but I'm thinking that this novel is more about mood and atmosphere and incidental drama than about the true development of the life of a character. Maybe I'm wrong; we'll see.