One of the strangest novels ever: Two Serious Women

I'm sure you've never heard of Jane Bowles's Two Serious Women, who has?, but I've seen it recommended a few times in past months and started it last night; published in I thin 1943 and reissued in a book of her complete works in 1966, and since mostly ignored. It is without a doubt one of the strangest novels I've ever read - not because it's experimental or extreme but because its surface style is so clam and traditional - a pretty long opening segment about the woman whom we think will be at the center of the story, Miss Goerhing, and her unhappy childhood, then leaping forward into her as an unmarried mature woman living with a companion (herself completely strange, shows up one day on the doorstep and Miss G invites her to live with her, which she does, almost on the spot - they might seem to be a couple but apparently aren't, not yet, but both rather bitter and cynical); then Miss G goes to a dinner party - these are pretty upscale people in a NYC suburb, where a gentleman, Arnold, 39, invites her to his house - she accepts, spends the night there (though not in his company) and he tells her he's in love with her, shows up at her house the next day and says he will travel with her (and her companion) - and she's by no means attracted to him. At which point we go into chapter 2, which is novella length, and is about a very minor character in chapters 1 (another dinner party guest), Mrs. Christopher (I think), traveling w/ her husband to Panama on what seems to be a pleasure cruise for fairly wealthy Americans. They take a cab into the city (Panama City, I guess), rent a roomy a a trashy hotel, and then go out and spend the night among prostitutes and street pimps - one comes up to them and says $1 for the two of you, and Mr. C leaves Mrs. C. with the prostitute as she goes off on her night of adventure. It sounds like a wild, crazy story - but it's told in such a staid and demure manner that it's completely unsettling: the characters seem deliberately so extremely against type that the novel almost falls apart in your hands - and yet, it's kind of appealing in a crazy way. It's like a couple of Edith Wharton characters have wandered into a William Burroughs novel (or maybe a Paul Bowles novel, her husband). She breaks rules by abandoning seemingly important characters, having her characters engage in very weird and risky behavior without apparent fear while they're also wildly inconsistent - Mrs. C. is comfortable walking alone in the night in the red-light district of Panama City but she was concerned that her 5th-floor hotel door didn't lock securely; she wanders into dingy restaurants led by a hooker, but she was mad at husband for not checking into the more expensive, tourist hotel. Even simple conventions: giving the two leading characters in part one names that each begin with G. Just to make it hard for us? I know nothing about Bowles, and there's no bio info on the jacket (I'll read the intro by Capote later); she appears to be an African-American, but the novel itself is strangely ungrounded from race, time, and place - I imagine it's set in the late 1930s, but there's no reference either to the Depression of the War or anything topical. Seems superficially in the realist/naturalist tradition but within the narrative it's anything but.