No there there? Silence Once Begun

Two-thirds of the way through Jesse Ball's novel Silence Once Begun, let's try to make some sense out of it, if sense can be made: Narrator (Jesse Ball, so shall we just call him the author?)'s wife suddenly and inexplicably lapses into silence; to help deal with? heal from? this matter, Ball begins to investigate a case of a man who opted for silence, in Japan, in I think1977. Most of the novel consists of his investigative records: transcripts of his own interviews with the man's (Oda's) family and other transcripts of police interrogations. I wrote about what Oda's story in yesterday's post but suffice to say that he signed a confession to a crime he did not commit, for which he eventually is tried and executed. Why he signed this confession (and in doing so apparently lets a mass murderer escape the charge) and why he never speaks up in his defense is the mystery of the book - still unresolved - but why this case helps Ball figure out the mystery of his wife's self-imposed silence is a deeper mystery, as she appears to have nothing whatsoever in common with Oda and his story, other than the sudden refusal to speak. (BTW - the final volume of Parade's End involves a self-imposed silence, as does the end of Othello - not sure if Ball is aware of these precedents in literature). 2nd part (last third) of the novel involves Ball's meeting with the Japanese woman who coerced Oda to sign the confession; Ball's meeting her some 20 or 30 years later in Japan and her willingness to discuss this with him for his project strains credulity, but I'll accept it, at least for the moment. This novel certainly seems highly literary: enigmatic (cf Murakami), mixed media (cf Sebald, Pron), allusive - but it is not grounded in realism (Murakami) and lacks the sense of geography, history, and psychological depth (Sebald) - I'm worried, as I near the end, that it has all the literary trappings but that there's no there there.