Book Review: Tony and Susan

This was a new experience reading a book:  bored and intrigued.
Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan has a promising premise.  Susan receives a manuscript from her former husband, Edward, with a request for her honest opinion, because Susan was always his best critic. 
Susan reads Edward’s novel, Nocturnal Animals, which focuses on Tony Hastings, whose wife and daughter are kidnapped and murdered by three men who forced Tony and his family off the road one night.  Suffering survivor’s guilt, Tony must work with Detective Bobby Andes to bring the three men to justice.
Tony becomes aware that justice for a terrible crime is also tempered by his keen sense of how ineffectual he was in protecting his family.  He ends up being forced along a dodgy path of revenge by the rule-bending Bobby Andes.
As Susan is caught up in the characters and plot of Edward’s novel, she also experiences her own recollection of her marriage to Edward, and she can’t help but feel that he is telling her something.
As I said, intriguing premise.  I admit I was chilled by Tony’s horrifying encounter with the three men, and I remained compelled enough to find out how Tony’s story (and Susan’s) would end.  I kept wondering what the author Austin Wright was up to.  What sort of secrets would emerge?  Why did Edward write his novel?  What is the nature of Susan’s memories?
Wright has an admirable literary style:

 “The new day stitches across the night’s wound as if her conscious life were continuous.” 

“Her dead memory of Edward was stored in bound volumes years ago, while the new living Edward flies around outside uncaught.”

 “What she remembers now is not so much happiness as places where happiness occurred.”

Yet, here’s the thing:  Wright’s novel has the quality of a page-turner, except my interest waned from time to time.  How is that possible?  A large part of it was due to Wright’s prose itself, which frequently devolved into disjointed sentence fragments to convey a character’s internal monologue.  Usually I don’t mind the judicious use of fragments, but Wright’s often jarred me out of the story because they would unaccountably shift from third-person to first-person narration, and past to present tense.
Wright’s novel ended as you might expect, but I kept waiting for the big reveal:  exactly how does Susan’s life tie into to Edward’s novel?  I’m not suggesting that the connection was missing altogether, but rather that the connection left me wanting more. Wright’s prose certainly had subtlety and nuance over the nature of Edward and Susan’s relationship, but ultimately I left the book with a modicum of “So what?”  I don’t think I overlooked anything; rather, I just wasn’t terribly satisfied.
So, in the end: more boring than intriguing.