I just want to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Dan Green's analysis of Nigel Beale's commentary. I am almost coming to resent the notion that all good stories have to be--and are necessarily--character driven.
Certainly the origins of the novel do not lie in "situations" that are rendered as closely as possible to those of "real life." Precursors to the novel such as Gulliver's Travels or Garganua and Pantagruel are plot-heavy phantasmagorias, anything but explorations of character, while most of the earliest actual novels, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, are either explicitly picaresque narratives whose characters never develop beyond their roles in the plots or tales in which what happens is clearly the focal point, not characters "relevant to me and my life." Those readers like Nigel, who recoil from novels "which impose artificial form on formless real life experience," even when such form is simply "plot," have formed a relationship with fiction rooted in late-nineteenth century realism, later developed into "pyschological realism," that might arguably be called character-centered, but such readers assume this sort of fiction essentially brought literary history to a halt and that other kinds of fiction, less dependent on "lifeness" so very narrowly conceived, are simply marginal, trivial, empty flourishes easily ignored. Only character-driven realism is "natural."
Let me put it this way; if you say that all good fiction is character driven, then you close the door on almost all fiction (in any form) written before the rise of psychological realism. To which I say this: Can a modern person read The Odyssey and enjoy it? They can and do, despite that book's focus on plot over character. So why couldn't a great modern book emphasize plot or ideas (or anything else) over character? In fact, of course, many do, but I should hardly have to bring up the post-modernists again, or Borges, or weird visionaries like Philip K. Dick.
I think 21st century fiction might turn out to be the process of crawling out of the tyrannical grip of psychological realism that the 20th century gave to us.