Note to J.A. Phillps: Readers like plot!

I posted yesterday that Jayne Anne Phillips's "Lark & Termite" is a promising read, and the promise still holds, as I've finished the first section (about 1/4th of the book) - but that's a pretty long time to hold out on just a promise. Is this novel good? Yes, of course, by most measures: it's smart and beautifully written, passage by passage, page by page. It demands close attention, but you do feel you're in sure hands, that the author knows her characters and her little slice of the world. The premise, a struggling working class family ca. 1959, single mom, one daughter in secretarial school, a son severely disabled, with all the misunderstandings and lack of support of that era (still today to some degree). The debt to Faulkner is huge - but Phillips, I have to say, is no Faulkner. Faulkner is deservedly immortal for finding, or creating, an entire world in hi as he famously called it, postage stamp of native soil. Phillips hasn't (yet) created a world - just a premise, a set of conditions. I'm holding out hope, but the hope is fading: something has to happen in this novel, it can't be, or at least I hope it won't be, a portrait of a group of people in time. As someone in my writers' group bluntly put it when one renegade member said she didn't like to write stories with plot: Readers like plot. (Back story is OK, and there's plenty of it here, but there's a reason it's called back story.) I looked at the back of the volume and saw, unsurprisingly, that many sections of Lark & Termite have been anthologized or in lit magazines. Each section is gorgeous, but this book has the danger of becoming much less than the sum of its parts.