Seriously odd: Jane Bowles's novel

So in what sense are the two ladies serious in Jane Bowles's novel, Two Serious Ladies?: They are NY women in presumably their 30s, they on the surface prim and proper,almost society ladies, well-to-do, but over the course of this very odd novel we see that neither is exactly what she seems. (The plot lines touch briefly in the first chapter and come together at the end when the two ladies meet in a Manhattan bar or supper club.) You could say that they are both abandoned by the men in their lives, but that's only partly true. Mrs. Copperfield is left behind by her husband who heads off on his own to explore South America, leaving her in Panama - but she is very complicit in this, and makes it clear that she's comfortable hanging around with the prostitutes of Colon. Strangely, there does not appear to be a sexual aspect to her attraction - she's just drawn to danger and the down low. Miss Goering's case is a little different: she's never been married, lives w/ a companion (again, there appears to be no sexual component to that arrangement), gets pursued by a lonely of a guy, Arnold, and also by Arnold's 60-something father (to whom she's more attracted) - both of whom move in w/ her on a rundown house she buys on an island somewhere near NYC (maybe a purely imaginary place?) - she's quite wealthy but living infra dig. In this story line - she abandons Arnold and pere, heading off to a small city on the mainland where she gets picked up by a rather seedy and unpleasant man in a bar, eventually moves in w/ him for I think 8 days, then leaves him for another guy she meets in the bar - a mobster thug, obviously, though maybe not obvious to her - and he abandons her in the aforementioned NYC supper club as he goes off with other goombahs on some kind of job. So both of the ladies like rough trade and danger, both have bad taste or bad luck in men but do nothing to try to establish or maintain any sort of healthy relationship, and neither really has a serious thought about anything other than her own comfort and survival. There are no children in this novel, and there is really no arc to the story - each narrative proceeds as a series of sequential but almost random events, somewhat like a dream though narrated in a very straightforward style with little access to the thoughts, perceptions, or backgrounds of either woman (aside from a first chapter on Miss G's childhood that feels as if it was pasted in from another work). It seems to me that Bowles may have just written along as her fancy dictated, and never went back to make the novel deeper or more internally consistent. Who knows? There are elements here that must come from her marriage to Paul Bowles - the Third World exploration, the woman's difficulty keeping up with the restless man - but this may be her revenge or last work on Paul B., the women have their strength and peculiar yearnings and desires as well, which may take them in a different direction altogether.