Jon McGregor's experimental narrative debut novel - will it hold up over 250 pp?

Jon McGregor's 2002 debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, is remarkable itself in a # of ways: extremely confident first novel for a writer in his 20s, an unusual structure and design, an experimental narrative that, at least through the first third, seems to hold together well. This is the kind of novel Virginia Woolf, an obvious antecedent, might have written is she could have transmigrated into our century. McGregor's novel is about all of the tenants om a single block in an unnamed British city, possible London, centering loosely on the events of a single day. There have been plenty of narratives with multiple narrative strands, connected by common locale - Gloria Naylor did a few of these in the 1980s, for example - but generally the form involves a chapter on each subject; McGregor's structure is more daring, in that most of the chapters include multiple narrators or protagonists, the story told in alternating paragraphs. Other chapters are first-person from a single narrator. All of the narration is in stream-of-consciousness style, eschewing conventional sentence structure and technique; the back cover of the pb American edition calls the novel a prose poem, which is a bit of a stretch but does get at McGregor's evident goal, which is to create a novel of mood and texture rather than plot and character. He does include, however, one apparently central dramatic event - an accident? explosion? terrorism incident? - that is reference but so far (100 pp.) not explained or described. All this said, the novel is surprisingly easy to read - if a little self-conscious in its styling. Will it hold up over 250 or so pp?: Readers do like plot (and character); McGregor establishes a scene very well, but as we move along in the novel we inevitably yearn for something to happen, for change, incident, insight, conflict, and conclusion.