Mystery readers won't like it, but it may be a perfect literary work - The Infatuations

I'm glad I've hung on with Javier Marias's novel The Infatuations as, at the half-way point or so, he introduces some major elements to the plot - I will not spoil this for those who have not read this novel - and finally gets things moving. The first hundred pages or so are a little rough - Marias is extremely intelligent and there are many fascinating insights and speculations about the big issues of life, death, love, jealousy - as well as many cogent asides and some fine descriptive passages, everything I look for and enjoy in serious literary fiction - but I was beginning to think the whole novel would be ruminative: what does it mean to lose someone suddenly to a violent death? what guilt to the survivors carry? what do we owe to the memory of the dead? All great topics but they can hold my attention for only so long - but Marias comes through and puts the narrator in moral and ethical jeopardy and honestly it's one of the few novels I've read in recent years that I'm just itching to get back to later to day to find out: what happens next? He still has time and space enough to disappoint me, but I don't think that will happen. His intelligence is really vast and his insights acute: there are, for example, some insightful moments in which the characters analyze a famous passage in Macbeth, and these passages are more provocative than most Shakespeare criticism - and, w/out saying more, the Macbeth element is introduced purposefully as there are analogies between this tragedy and the events of this novel. The Infatuations is probably not for everyone - most readers who like a good, traditional murder mystery will be put off by all the interior monologues and self-analysis - and it's what I would call anti-cinematic (in the way that Proust is as well), a novel that when stripped of voice and tone would leave, I think, far too skeletal and even conventional plot to make a good movie - and in a sense these are the perfect literary works: an imitation of an action, in words, that can be told or conveyed in no other form or format.