A good writer who could become much better - if somebody pushed him a little

So I was the main "debby downer" at book group last night, unabashedly expressing my frustration with, my disappointment in Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names: so many opportunities to develop an engaging plot and intriguing characters but in the end the two lead characters were entirely opaque, the story of the African coup was in my view completely generic (except of the pretty engaging scenes of the "paper revolution" on the college campus - I thought muich more would come out of that, but it ended up being a plot element that was left by the wayside), the Helen chapters in the U.S. dull and unexamined. Others liked the novel somewhat more, though there were no great enthusiasts or defenders; best we could come up with was that the characters are meant to be exiles and misfits - OK, well and good, but that doesn't mean they have to be complete blanks to us. These are first-person narratives, and the characters should certainly examine and express their feelings, tell us more about their history, etc. - I compared All Our Names with a great novel about, as it happens, an African-American who is an outside: Ellison's Invisible Man - yes, to others he's invisible, but not to us! He tells us so much about his childhood, his college years, his arrival in NYC, his struggles to make a living and to fit in, his eventual radicalism, the exploitation, his disillusionment and disappearance - a whole life, in other words. The Isaac character especially - he's supposed to be a writer, but he shares no thoughts or significant observations w/ us; he's an avid reader, memorizing dozens of pages, supposedly, by Dickens, but he offers no reflection as to why he read Dickens, what he sees in him. One group member expressed amazement that DM was able to capture so well the tone and gestures of a Midwestern, conservative, middle-aged woman, to which I say, so what? DM came to the U.S., to Peoria, apparently, at the age of 2 - he would have known hundreds of midwestern moms. No, I don't quite get it, why this book was greeted so enthusiastically: in part I guess because of the great interest - which I share - in news from the 3rd world and in the immigrant communities in the U.S., in part because DM seems from all I can see and can fathom from his reading like an absolutely good guy and a writer w/ huge potential (though not delivered yet, in my view), in part because critics in general are afraid of missing the boat, of being unkind to a young writer, especially a writer of color, are afraid of being the lone voice in opposition (god bless the few who aren't afraid; it's not easy) so the review have been unduly accommodating. When you get right down to it, why would an editor or agent want to push DM to make this novel any different - they knew it would be successful even in its half-baked form. I wish DM the best, but I think - if an editor or a friend were to push him - his best could be much better.