Less than the sum of its parts? (Lark & Termite)

No question that Jayne Anne Phillips is a very good writer, but there is another question: Is she a good novelist? I know that readers & critics have raved about "Lark and Termite," and it's easy to see why, page by page, scene by scene. I'm now well into the 2nd section, about a third of the way through the book, and it feels like a book entirely built around a premise. She has established these rather unusual characters, a good starting point for a novel - working-class family in a West Va. coal town ca 1959, devoted sister taking care of her severely disabled younger brother. But to this point, honestly, nothing has happened (at least in the foreground story; we also have a back story about the disabled boy's father, dying in a friendly-fire massacre in Korea ca 1950). I'm tempted to say that you can't really have a whole novel about a day in the life of one family told from multiple (or in this case alternating among 3 characters) POV, but of course you can - if you're James Joyce, if you're Faulkner, if you build a great deal of incident and variety and life into the texture of the novel. Lark and Termite, for all its strengths, feels suffocated. Another issue, at least for me, is that Phillips has no desire to or no capacity for entering finding the appropriate voice for her characters. I have no problem with first-person (or close third-person) narrations that imbue characters with a rich interior life a copious store of observations - see, Rabbit Angstrom - but especially in a first-person narration it helps to have the voice sound like the voice of a character (see, Faulkner). Phillips's Lark, a secretarial student of some intelligence but no worldliness, sounds like no one other than the author herself, with her writerly vocabulary rich with shards, orbs, and the like. I'll see where this goes, but it seems, so far, to be a novel that amounts to less than the sum of its parts.