In the shadow of Ulysses: An Irish stream-of-consciousness novel, Solar Bones

I continue to be impressed by Mike McCormack's tour de force novel, Solar Bones (2017), as I'm now more than halfway through and then novel still consists of one sentence! I also think the actual foreground events of the novel, the "stream of consciousness," or should we say scream of consciousness?, of the narrator, Marcus, may take place during one day or one 24-hour span, though of course his consciousness takes us back in time to his childhood and reflects on various recent events in his life, so the novel covers a scope much broader than one day. As noted yesterday, the style is unusual but not daunting - it's surprisingly easy to read and, to be honest, MMcC could have presented it more conventionally, w/ traditional punctuation and paragraph breaks - though his narrative style is a big part of the success of this novel: It truly makes us feel as if we are in the "mind" of another, and it also has a headlong rush to it, as w/ no obvious break points in the narration we get caught in the (figurative) flow and keep reading, or at least I do. That said, the novel could do w/ a little more plot development - some issue or crisis or conflict that brings the story to a head or a crest, rather than an assemblage of thoughts, memories, and sensations. (The novel may be building toward some kind of crescendo regarding a public-health crisis, but we're more than halfway through so it's getting late in the day). All Irish writers live in the shadow of Joyce, and I believe MMcC is aware of Joyce's presence looming over him: this is a Ulyssean story of an Irish everyman who encompasses a vast world in his own consciousness and in the a single place and a moment in time. The theme, it seems to me, is the conflict in Marcus's mind, and to a degree in our contemporary culture, between order and public service and self-service and corruption in public life: Marcus is an engineer, who believes in rational solutions; his job is to build bridges and maintain public roads (there's a metaphor at work in that), and he finds himself in conflict w/ various forces of petty corruption: politicians who pressure him to show favoritism toward projects in their districts, various schemes for raking money and property from the public trough, and ultimately a crisis in the water system - which makes his wife grievously ill - and which, we'll see, may have been caused by public corruption or official neglect.