Chile Peppers: Is Zambra's novel a work of contempt, or hubris?

Really wanted to like Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home but can extend it only so much good will - before I sadly have to say - the emperor has no clothes, so to speak. This novella - 140 pp of very generous print and much white space - started off as very promising: Zambra sketches in some of the really important issues that have touched his life and the life of his country, Chile, and suggests mysterious ties and connections between these cataclysmic events and the life of his narrator: the earthquake in Chile, ca 1985, which begins the novella, as the narrator is living outside in a tent and neighbors and others gather around a bonfire and for the first time he encounters the beautiful daughter (Claudia) of mysterious solitary neighbor (Raul); later, Claudia asks him to follow Raul and report to her and narrator sees strangers entering/leaving R's house; this becomes a tie to the oppression of the Chilean dictatorship, as we later learn that R. is in hiding and that he apparently hides and protects others. OK, all good as a premise for a novel, but what does Z. do with this material? Honestly, very little - the other strands of the novel are two: first, jumps about 20 years forward in time and Claudia returns from her life in the U.S. (Vermont) for father's funeral, spats with her sister, connects again with narrator (that's when she tells him about her father's political life), they have a brief relationship, and that ends. Second strand: in two (of the four) sections of the novel, the narrator, now the novelist, asks his ex or ex-girlfriend, Eme, to read the manuscript he's working on, that is, the other two sections of this novel. She kind of refuses, then reads it reluctantly, is obviously not taken with it, which leads Z to ponder other things he could have written about or wishes he had: he drops in some lines of poetry he's working on, he wishes his work could be just a string of images, he indulges in quite a bit of name checking. How disappointing, and in fact disingenuous. Imagine for a moment, American reader, how you would react to this book if it were set in, say, Berkeley, circa 1965? If it were by an American writer who spends half the novel wondering if he should be writing a novel, this novel? Doesn't this sound like about 10,000 graduate-school novels in progress circa 1975 and the height of the long-defunct postmodernism? We seem to genuflect before too many so-called experimental works from Europe and Latin America - wanting, hoping, expecting that they bring us news from another culture, but to me Ways of Going Home is old news. There's plenty of material here that could lead to a great novel - and Zambra knows that - but to abandon that material and frame it with some temperamental ruminations on what the novel could have or should have been is an abandonment of the novelist's responsibility to his readers. Including a character who is reading the very book we are reading - and doesn't like it! - may be an attempt to disarm negative criticism, or maybe it's an act of contempt or hubris.