Sense of an Ending: A novel? Or an outline for a novel?

In part, this is because I've just finished reading Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, so maybe it was a mistake to go next to this year's Booker-Man winner (and next month's book-club choice), Julian Barnes's "The Sense of an Ending," but - intriguing as parts of this very very short novel may be - doesn't it seem, at least half-way through it, like an outline for a novel? The story is about: Tony, a mature man looks back at his whole life, beginning with his days a young man from a middle- or perhaps working-class London family is part of a gang of three guys in what the English so amusingly still call a "public school" - and 4th guy joins the gang, by far the smartest of the lot. The boys graduate and go their separate ways, the narrator goes to a mid-level university, and he recounts his years of sexual frustration with his girlfriend. They break up. He graduates, travels, comes home to learn that smart friend, who'd gone to Cambridge, has committed suicide (also that he's started dating Tony's ex-girlfriend). Flash-forward many years, Tony now a divorcee living alone, gets a strange inheritance - ex-girlfriend's mother, whom he barely knew, leaves him 500 pounds and dead friend's diary. As you can see, there's a lot of potential plot here - but I don't think it's just that I've just finished Proust, who would have needed all 7 volumes to recount this much material, but it seems that Barnes is rushing through it - I don't believe a book (or a sentence) should be any longer than it needs to be, but this one feels underdeveloped, like a sketch for a screenplay. But we'll see what happens in the 2nd half - Barnes is well known for literary tricks and devices, and his title, with its echo of the great work of criticism by Kermode, hints at surprises in store. Or maybe not.