A demanding but lagely successful novel about a dysfunctional family in Italy: Ferocity

I sneaked a look at the NYT review of Nicola Lagioia's novel Ferocity (2014, English tr 2017) and completely disagree w/ reviewer's main points (in 1st and last paragraphs; will read full review later). First of all, Ferocity has little in common w/ noir fiction, no matter what the setting (reviewer joked that this is Southern Italian noir - it's set in Puglia): Aside from the almost utter lack of night-time street scenes, the protagonist, Michele, is hardly a detective, though he is on a quest to determine the true cause of the death of his half-sister, Clara. But Michele is a memorable character because of his lifelong battles, first against the wealthy real-estate development family into which he joins at birth (the out-of-wedlock child of the father; mother died in childbirth - in one of the many appealing quirks of this novel the narrator recognizes how unlikely that is outside of bad fiction), later his struggles against mental illness, which gets him booted out of the army and consigned to various mental hospitals for many years. He's, in essence, a bumbling and ineffective seeker of truth. Second, I was surprised that the reviewer said the NL developed lots of material but never knew quite what to do w/ the narration; not so - if anything this narrative is over-determined, bring about more of a resolution that most contemporary works of literary fiction, which tend to be "open" narratives, with ambiguous or inconclusive endings. In essence, this novel begins with the death of the daughter/sister Clara, which we see from the start involved her walking naked down a highway and struck by a passing truck; the family then goes to great lengths and expense to cover up her cause of death and to give out that she killed herself by leaping from a parking-garage deck. Why? Though there are various clues throughout, we don't learn until near the end of this relatively long (447 pp) novel exactly what motivated this deception - but along the route toward the resolution we get an inside look at the corruption and violence behind the family's business enterprise. There's a ton of material in this book - it's much longer than most contemporary plot-driven novels - and sometimes I felt lost or in the dark; that's because NL's style is an extreme example of the show-don't-tell dicta; most of the time we are right in the middle of a scene or confrontation and it takes a bit to get out bearings; the narrator never steps in with background or scene-setting. Everything we see is through the eyes of one of the characters - so we don't even get the usual transitional phrases such as "She left the car in the garage and took the elevator up to her father's office" - we constantly have to figure out where we are, who these characters are, have we met them before?, etc. So, yes, this novel requires some degree of effort on the reader's part, but it's rewarding in that the journey is actually going somewhere and along the way we get to know and empathize w/ a # of characters, some of whom are by most standards quite unsavory. This seems to be a novel yearning to become a TV series - and maybe it will.