A (possibly) great novel that it's (probably) impossible to like

Smart, unusual, funny (add to list from yesterday the darkly hilarious scene in which the Painter interrogates the engineer about the virtues, or not, of building power plants), even significant it may be, I'm giving up on Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost, about half-way through - and why is that? Much as I've enjoyed - if that's the right word in regard to a novel so dark and pessimistic - this novel scene by scene, I'm also frustrated by the lack of structure or maybe it's two-dimensional structure. Plot isn't everything but novels need to move along a course in time, something has to happen, something has to change, some conflict has to develop and perhaps resolve, characters have to evolve and get new insight, we have to evolve and get new insight - in short there has to be some arc or direction to the story, even in the most challenging and plotless of novels (Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow) there is movement and direction and evolution. Not in Frost; though Bernhard dutifully divides the chapters by days, there's not much or even any difference from day to day - each is just another series of conversations and encounters between the medical student and the painter, Stauch. In some ways then novel is an homage to the greatest of German novels, The Magic Mountain: a young  many arrives in a remote, wintry village and checks into a lodging where he meets, in this case, one philosophical elderly man approaching death and sharing his world views - but it's an anti-Magic Mountain, not a sanitarium for a wealthy international clientele but a run down inn in an industrial wasteland populated largely by thugs and boors, the intellectual is full of hatred, vitriol, self-loathing, and self-pity - and the young man is, in a sense, a spy, sent on a mission by his supervisor to report on Stauch (the supervisor's estranged brother). So that's another element that's important to this novel, which in part looks back at the Nazi era and guilt that those who lived through that time carry with them, and in part it looks at the Soviet era - the spies, the interrogation, the hideous industrial development, the complete lack of privacy and individuality, the omnipresence of the state. Bernhard was Austria, and the novel is set in an imaginary landscape (I think - none of the place names were familiar to me, anyway), which could be Austria or either E or W Germany, and has elements of all I think. Though sections were great and Bernhard was clearly a writer of high ambition and with a deliberate scorn for the conventions of fiction (and commerce), he makes it deliberately difficult to engage w/ this novel other than in pieces.