Trying to make sense of Murray Bail's Eucalyptus

Starting to think it's ridiculous to read Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus (1998) as in any way a realistic/naturalistic novel about a father's relationship w/ his beautiful daughter and his bizarre efforts to match her w/ a husband-to-be. Even by the widest reach of eccentricity, no normal man would pledge his daughter to the first man to be able to ID the correct species of the hundred of so eucalypts on his property (and this all takes place in late 20th-century Australia - not some sage from the middle ages). OK, so how do we interpret this weird novel? As noted yesterday, it feels like the last gasp of postmodernism (fittingly, at the very end of the 20th century) in which authors had free reign to include in their works all kinds of disparate elements and modes, that authors won "points" for off-beat and unexpected references to the process of writing, when narrative strands were deliberately left unfinished,  when the plot deliberately (one hopes) meandered, and when authors were encouraged to expose and dwell on their personal obsessions or love for arcana. This novel checks all of those boxes, especially the arcana, as every chapter is named for a eucalypt species, which shows me of course how knowledgeable Bail is or at least that he's assiduous at research but really doesn't inform me about his plot or his characters. At this point, 2/3 of the way through this novel, the daughter (Ellen), left to her own as the father (Holland) spends 10 days or so w/ a suitor (Cave) who seems about to win the species-ID challenge, begins spending time w/ a young man whom she finds sleeping in a grove on the property; w/out introducing himself in any way, he begins telling her "stories," none of which seems to come to a conclusion - how postmodern! How Arabian-nights-like! But to what end? We get the sense that this entire novel is an improvisation - again, a last gasp of postmodern sensibility - but overall it's not paying off for me. Friend DC who recommended I check out this book noted an unusual twist at the end, so I will definitely finish reading, but, sadly, with minimal expectations.