Clunk, clunk: The sound of a novel falling apart

Clunk, clunk - that's the sound you hear when the machinery of plot making breaks apart and leaves nuts and bolts and pieces of the chassis along the side of the highway as the narrative tumbles, or stumbles, along - and that's what I'm hearing at the end of part 3, that is, near the end, of Daniel Menaker's The Treatment. As noted in previous posts my hope has been that M. can make good on his terrific premise, a novel about a man and his analyst, and the ongoing struggle for control, as the man, the narrator (for the most part) of the novel, Jake Singer, tries to develop a strong and loving relationship with a woman and to reconcile with his elderly, widowed father, and to advance in his career at a prep school without compromising his ideas, while his analyst insists on various rules, e.g., he is not to take his lover to meet his father without first discussing this issue in treatment. So is the analyst actually helping Singer build independence, or is he crushing that independence through blind adherence to the principles of the profession? And is Singer's struggle for independence a healthy part of the process - that is, is he cured when he can tell the analyst, Morales, to fuck off? Great premise, Morales a tremendously smart and funny character, one of the few if not the only novel about this patient-doctor dynamic - but over time the novel becomes, unfortunately, increasingly about Singer and his relation with lover, Allegra - what made the novel unique is pushed to the margins. Well and good, if the secondary narrative were equally compelling, but it isn't, as it devolves into a conventional story about a battle over a child - Allegra trying to adopt her and suddenly the birth-mother seeks return of custody. To move this along further, at end of part 3, Menaker has Singer totally improbably answer telephone at Allegra's home and engage in discussion with caseworker looking into the adoption, through which he, completely impossible, learns the name and address of the birth mother; then, S. goes off to a town near with birth-mother lives, stays with a friend, and woman comes up and rings the bell asking to use the phone - and guess who the woman is. You figure the chances. No, it's preposterous. Well, novelists do this all the time, which is OK I guess if you're Dickens but not if you're writing a novel that feels contemporary and real, or should: if the characters have to meet up, it's job of the novelist to figure out a way to make that happen - preferably through action by the protagonist (that's the pro in protagonist) not through chance or happenstance. One possibility: couldn't S. have learned about the birth mother through records on file in his schools (Allegra's child attends the school), which would be an action that would put him in moral and ethical jeopardy - all good things for developing a novel. But M. did not think of them; he took the easy way out. Clunk.