Why The Children's Book would make a lousy soap opera

I will keep reading "The Children's Book" out of loyalty to my book group - even though I've passed the half-way point and it's obvious to me that this is not my kind of book and never will be. There are great novels in here, but it's a porridge or even a miasma of characters, ideas, themes, and styles and you have to find your way through it - A.S. Byatt won't help you. I'm at the point where Elsie Warren, Philip's sister, announces she's pregnant and a trio of women, Mrs. Dace, Mrs. Metheley, and who's the 3rd?, I'm not even sure, conspire to help her - even though all are aware that Mr. Metheley is the likely father. Here's a perfect example of Byatt's perversity. She devotes a whole chapter to Metheley's flirtation with Elsie, but we never see the relationship actually develop - Byatt blithely elides key scenes that don't interest her. On the other hand, we now spend a great stretch of time with the women helping Elsie - the 3rd one, I just remember, is Marian Oakestreet (?), who's had her own child "out of wedlock" with Humphry - but we know virtually nothing about any of them. That is to say: there are so many characters, but Byatt lets her focus wonder about among them. At times, this feels like an outline for a soap opera or miniseries, and these characters are not meant to be more than sketches. And that would be okay, if the plot were sufficiently dramatic or even melodramatic - but it's lacking in the basic tensions and "collisions of forces" that motivate commercial fiction and for that matter successful literary fiction - compare this with say Tess of the D'urbervilles, where you really understand the characters and their suffering, and the differences is worlds.