Putting faith in novelists: We expect the strands to come together

Reading a novel, we put faith in the author - that what he or she begins he/she will resolve, that the many strands and characters and locations put forth in the opening chapters all bear some meaning to the book as a whole and relevance to one another. I am putting faith in Nicole Krauss as I read her novel "Great House" because she gets so much right, but I also, halfway through the novel, am a bit concerned. First half of the novel consists of four sections of about equal weight and import, each one very well written, especially the first, which gives a terrific account of the life of the writer and sets in motion a kind of mystery about the provenance of a writer's desk that gets bequeathed in varying circumstances to a number of different authors. The next three sections have other oblique references to this desk, and one of the main characters in the first section, the Chilean poet who left the desk behind in nyc and then "disappeared" under Pinochet thuggery, makes a brief appearance in the 3rd section, as he meets the mother who gave him up for adoption. Still and all, I'm half-way through the book and much as I like each section the strands have not yet come together. Will they? I fear at times that Krauss is better at the elements of fiction than at the overall architecture of a novel, or that she has a tendency to get too fanciful and playful with her narrative structure - but I am interested in each of the characters she creates and will follow them to the end - Fourth section contains terrific account of the loneliness and uncertainty a graduate exchange student feels in adjusting to a new land, very thoughtfully and beautifully conveyed.