A novel without relationships?

There's no doubt that there are many positive qualities in Alice McDermott's Someone - in particular her evocation of the dynamics of an Irish-Catholic family and of the gradual emigration from Brooklyn, as the neighborhood deteriorates, into the bland but safe and clean LI suburbs, and she can be very sharp at depicting character and emotion - the emotional highlight of the novel clearly being the episode in which the alcoholic and abusive Walter leads on and then cruelly dumps the overly trusting narrator, Marie - it is this experience of betrayal and humiliation that will shape much of her life, though she does overcome this trauma and raises a healthy and loving family - all that said, this is a novel that never really comes together - it's full of ingredients but they don't cohere, much like the Irish soda bread that Marie fails at baking. McDermott takes on a very broad swath of time for this relatively short narrative - the entire life of Marie, in fact - and it's not clear what she gains by jumping around in time rather than going w/ straight chronology. More important, the broad stretch of time distends the focus of the novel - odd, in that the motif of much of the story is Marie's troubled vision, from childhood near-sightedness to adult ocular disease - McDermott is great at depicting the world from the viewpoint of someone losing sight. Biggest problem, though, is that there are really no relationships in this novel - we see only a little of Marie's loving relationship with her father, we know very little about her married life or her relationship to her children - but the novel's not about these potential but undeveloped relationships - it's essentially, I think, meant to be about Marie and her brother, Gabe - the evolving relationship between them, as he's the brilliant older brother, enters the seminary, leaves for reasons never fully explained, consoles her beautifully after breakup with Walter, and then we learn of his troubled adult life and his own breakdown - but as w/ far too much in this novel these events are narrated by characters rather than depicted by McDermott (challenge of first-person narration, but there are potential solutions) - and finally we know nothing about how their relationship evolves after they take Gabe into their fam following his crack-up. So much left unsaid and unexamined in this novel - and it's not as if these are subtle brushstrokes - it's a novel that has many fully colored scenes, so it's puzzling how McDermott could leave so much out. It's also a novel of almost unrelenting sorrow and illness - so Marie's triumph over all of this, her successful family life, feels like a weird aberration - the one candle in a world of darkness.