Book group thoughts, and mine, on Silence Once Begun

Predictably I was on the extreme in book group last night for discussion of Jesse Ball's Silence Once Begun. I confess to being the most conservative reader in the group and expect stories not necessarily to be conventional and realistic - I am a huge fan of many writers who do not fit that description at all such as Sebald, Murakami, Kafka, Proust, Coover, the list could go on - but I do expect the author to fulfill his or her "contract" with the reader: one would feel cheated and betrayed if you got to the end of, say, a Dickens novel and the author said: I'm not going to tell you what happens to these characters, or if a supernatural being stepped into the plot and resolved the conflicts. I felt betrayed by Ball's novel in that it purports to be an "investigation" of an actual event but the facts of the novel are so preposterous that nobody could believe them for a second. I imagined myself as Ball's agent or editor, and would give him two pieces of advice: first, you've got to resolve the issue of the disappearance into silence of the narrator's wife - at the least bring the narrator together with her for a confrontation or conversation or at the very least show what his investigation into silence teaches him about the estrangement of his wife; 2nd, you've got to give us some access to the consciousness of Oda. It's fine that the novel is built upon supposed records or recordings of interviews with Oda, during which he says nothing, but you can't leave him as entirely opaque - maybe have a section that's his secret journal or something. But who am I to judge? Others felt otherwise: BR in particular loved the mysterious tone and the idiosyncratic design of the novel; JRi was captivated by the narrative although, like me, was totally put off by the twist at the end; LR posited that Oda may have had some guilt or trauma in his youth that led him to accept guilt for the crime that he didn't commit; OK, maybe, but then show us that in some manner. Overall, I felt that we spent a lot of time filling in the blank spaces in the novel - giving the narrative more attention than the author did, in some ways. RR is the most generous reader in the group and worked hard to elucidate what may have been Ball's narrative intentions. I don't think an author has to spell everything out and sometimes opacity can create its own mood - think of how Kafka alludes to guilt and shame without specifying a cause or an action, and how that imbues his work with mystery. Here, it all felt to me second-hand and derivative. But I was pretty much alone - others were more curious, or forgiving.