Three things that are wrong about The Sense of an Ending

Book group last night, with exception of J. who loved the book because of its meditations on history and how we can "know" the truth about past events in the absence, or even presence, of live witnesses, was universally disappointed in Julian Barnes's "The Sense of and Ending." Because? Let me count the reasons. 1. Ridiculous plot. There is no reasonable way to accept or even explain why the mother of Tony's girlfriend some 40 years after they'd ended their college romance would bequeath him 500 pounds and the diary of his friend, Adrian, who'd committed suicide - other than to serve as a plot device. Further (spoilers to come), there is no reasonable way to explain how or why Adrian would have had an affair with his girlfriend's mother and even gotten her pregnant. 2. Meaningless plot. If you want to go so far as to accept the largely implausible plot, you're left wondering: what does it mean and why does it matter? Ultimately, at the end, the narrator, Tony, learns some lurid and to a degree tragic facts that explain why Adrian broke up with his girlfriend 40 years ago and may even explain Adrian's suicide - and so what? Tony has lived for 40 years without thinking about these people - imagine a much stronger plot - it isn't hard to do - in which Tony is deeply involved with old girlfriend (Veronica) throughout his life and what he learns at the end causes him to reconsider and reevaluate all of his ideas, conceptions, values. This novel isn't it. 3. Just briefly - manipulative narrator. An unreliable narrator - a la FM Ford, Ishigura - is one thing, and a novel full of doubt and mystery and ambiguity - e.g., Atonement, which perhaps is haunting Barnes a bit - is one thing, but here we don't have an unreliable narrator, in which we know more than the narrator does, but rather the opposite - a narrator who withholds from us crucial bits of information for no reason other than to build tension and mystery in the plot: that's fine if the narrator is Marlowe or Spade of Spenser - although even they don't withhold info so much as reveal info in a straight narrative sequence - but this narrator has no reason to do so - he's supposedly trying to understand how we can gain knowledge of the past, but this novel, despite the sophomoric discussions of the young men in the opening scenes, does little or nothing to examine the questions that Barnes initially sets forth.