Why Sleepwalkers is no Magic Mountain

So, nearing halfway through Hermann Bloch's The Sleepwalkers I have to ask myself: Is this book a great novel? Is it even a good novel? So far, to me it's mainly a curiosity. Part One contained some very odd and dramatic scenes, particularly when we got inside the head of the main character, Joachim, and saw people, in particular his beloved Elisabeth, as he saw them: who could ever forget his vision of Elisabeth as a landscape projected on a wall? And the opening scene describing the three-legged walk of J's father was powerful and peculiar. But part one does not stand alone as a great novella by any means - so I wondered how part 2 would add to and develop this opening section. A thin thread ties these two parts together - the main character of part 2, Esch, works for a company that J's best friend in part 1, the businessman, now owns (some 30 years later), although that seems an insignificant and tangential detail so far. Part 2 promises still perhaps to be a story of political engagement and social isolation, which could be a real window onto German society in the early 20th century but to be honest that plot is just not getting off the ground 100 pages in: Esch, intriguing literary outsider though he may be, really hasn't done much of interest as he meanders from ob to job and girl to girl - now he's moved back to his native Cologne to be a promoter for a laldies' wrestling act. OK, but what to make of all this? On some level, we see the aimlessness and alienation of youth in Germany ca 1905 - but that isn't really enough for a great novel. Though I chalk up Musil's Man without Qualities as one of the great unreadables, at least it has the noble ambition of being a complete chronicle of life in its time (in Austria), and you can't even begin to compare Bloch with the works of Mann for depth and thought and range of ideas - even a short story like Mario and the Magician has much more to say about German culture than this meandering narrative. It does have moments of great strength - not only the descriptive passages mentioned above, but some of the complex and comic dialogue - but a great novel has not only its own unique and instantly recognized style, as well as its own sense of oddity and peculiarity, that is, it's a world unto itself, but it has to have some kind of forward movement and evident design, and so far in Sleepwalkers - almost halfway in - I'm losing track of the Bloch's purpose as an artist. I'll keep with him for a while - but somebody give me a clue.