What's the point?

More than 60 pages into this book I still have no idea what Barnes is talking about or where he's going with the story. Maybe that's the point of post-modernism, but if so I don't get post-modernism. I much prefer romanticism/modernism to realism/post-modernism. What is the point of reading about someone with a mediocre to sucky life? It's fiction, you're not supposed to have to struggle through someone else's troubles when its not even interesting to do so. Why would you bother to make that stuff up? There's plenty of it in the real world. If you're going to make something up, why not make it interesting and relevant, or at least enjoyable for your readers? I don't get why Barnes would bother to write an uninteresting book about an author of uninteresting books. What a waste of ink. For the character, Braithwaite, who is creepily obsessed with Flaubert, maybe going through all the letters he ever wrote looking for random mentions of various animals is thrilling. I don't really think so. Maybe there's something else going on here, that is fascinating and ingenius, but I sure don't see it. I could just be too narrow-minded or something. But so far, Flaubert's Parrot just isn't doing it for me. That came off a little harder than I had intended, but you get the point.