Abandonment of the novel: A book that's all situation and no plot

OK I'll probably finish reading Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment because it's pretty short and I'm now about halfway through so why not but honestly is it really such a great book? On the evidence half-way through, not really - in an odd sense Ferrante has benefited I think from her abjuration of publicity: I think I would never have heard about her much less talked about her with friends and sought out her book in the back shelves of the Providence Public Library if it hadn't been for the intriguing fact that nobody knows who she is. Days of Abandonment is clearly well written scene by scene and is a subject and treatment that resonates with many women readers - but not women only, as I'm all for her as she struggles to keep her life together after being cruelly, suddenly, and mysteriously abandoned by husband, Mario. But over the first half of the novel, it's a story that just doesn't move from its premises - one rant and rage after another, one crackup or failing after another, as she tries to find out why Mario left, with whom, where he's gone. Scene by scene, the novel is excellent; for ex., last night I read a scene in which she came home and her young children were inside and it takes her a while to realize, how did they get in? The she sees that the lock had been jimmied; she surmises Mario came back surreptitiously to grab a pair of earrings (that had been his mother's), all very creep - more evidence of what a shit M. is, if we needed any more. She decides to replace the locks; two workmen come to do the job, and they stink up her place and make lascivious comments, till she gives it right back to them and more. OK, a really good scene, very credible, and establishing the narrator's forthright and even reckless character. But I would expect this novel, any good novel for that matter, to establish its premises and then move on: she should be unraveling the mystery of Mario's disappearance, learning about him and about herself and her children, or else moving away from him toward some new episode in her life. I don't necessarily think this novel should or even remotely could become a Hallmark movie, but couldn't it at least have been a topical and emotional best-seller about abandonment, like, say Sue Miller's The Good Mother, an infinitely better book? But maybe Ferrante has some surprises in store in the second half, so I'll stay with he, for a while.