It does get better?: Waiting for plot to develop in The Flamethrowers

I'm going on faith now but others tell me that Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers does get better - I've hit the half-way point and just finished an extremely long account of a party of downtown NYC artists and art-types circa 1976 - this is a scene that seems to be modeled on one of Proust's 1910 Paris soirees chez Guermantes in which there are incredibly complex webs tying the characters to one another - one was married to another, one tried to shoot another, members of various rival political or cultural sects - and in this instance all seen through the lens of the provincial naif narrator (not even sure of her name - does she have a name? - much like Proust's narrator in that regard as well). To say that Proust does it better is not in any way a putdown of Kushner - nobody matches Proust for that kind of socially complex and evocative writing. But here's the difference: Search of Lost Time is a grand novel about the evolution of a society and about the "sentimental education" of the protagonist. In Flamethrowers, at least to this point, the novel is a series of events that do not seem to mold or shape the central character at all. The novel is set 35 years in the past, but there is no wise reflection to give the novel depth and perspective. The narrator faces into the wallpaper. I am not especially interested in the eccentrics that she is parading before us and would probably give up on this book at this point, but on recommendations I will keep reading - hoping that Kushner will pull these strands together into a plot or a design. The narrator has to have some goal or objective to achieve, some crisis to resolve, some conflict to face and overcome, or at the very least a distinct voice that defines her as a characters and wry observer. Otherwise, she'll lose me eventually.