What Makes a Novel Complex?

And why complexity in fiction is a form of insanity

I’m interested in long, complex novels. It’s a special category because not all complex novels are long, and not all long novels are complex. For example, one of the world’s longest, Madame de Scudéry’s Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, can be more interminable than intimidating. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is long, but arguably not as complex as its length might suggest, on account of its collaged construction. Complexity inheres in some of its sections, such as “The Part About Arcimboli.” By contrast, “The Part About the Crimes” has an experimental anti-narrative structure, but is not complex in the way I mean.

Yet complexity and length are often intertwined, and it can be hard to prize them apart. My qualifications to speak about this are the usual sieges I’ve conducted on long novels, from Antagony to the Septology, from Szentkuthy to Ellmann, from Cao Xueqin and Journey to the West to fan fiction (the world’s longest fiction!) and Alexis Wright. I have also moderated several international reading groups: one on Finnegans Wake, another on translations of that novel, a third on Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum (translated as Bottom’s Dream), and a fourth on Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual. (The last two are ongoing, and everyone is welcome.) My interest is in the end very practical: I’ve written a long, complex novel about long, complex novels, so I’ve been reading with an eye to seeing how writers have managed to keep a sense of order in very lengthy projects. More on that at the end.

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Complexity in art is not an easy subject. It’s tarnished by its association with privileged, over-educated white male writers, from Joyce and Proust to David Foster Wallace. And it’s ideologically ruined by its association with the Frankfurt School of modernist criticism, according to which serious, ambitious modern art has to be complex. I have a different and simpler idea of complexity. I like to think of it as a property that emerges naturally when a book is long enough. That’s because, as Montaigne knew, and despite our best intentions, thought wanders where it wants, and so do moods and feelings. Any novel that gives itself the space will eventually go off topic. War and Peace has twenty-four philosophical essays in it. The Man without Qualities begins as essays, gets lost, and stays lost.

It helps to distinguish what I’ll call genuine complexity from simple complexity. A highrise building is complex in an uninteresting way: its storeys repeat over and over, and although it may have features like rooftop ornaments or a tuned mass damper, it’s fundamentally a massive iteration. A highrise involves a lot of engineering and specialized skills, and in that sense it isn’t like buildings before the Industrial Revolution, but I’m not happy calling that “complexity” because in the end it’s mechanical.

I’d like to call things like jets, atomic clocks, particle accelerators, and highrise buildings “intricate,” and reserve “complex” for objects that don’t clearly or consistently follow precedents, patterns, or formulas—objects that are in effect unique or unclassifiable. Among buildings, that would be any number of medieval cathedrals, Hindu and Jain temples, and recent one-of-a-kind buildings like the Sagrada Familia. Expensive watches have “complications”: logically speaking, they are mechanisms that refine the control and display of time—but the watches still work as watches. Each bevel and gear plays its part and comforms to engineering and mechanical expectations. Complications are intricate but not complex.

By the same reasoning I don’t count murder mysteries as genuinely complex. They often have elaborate plots, but in the end everything’s tied up. A genuinely complex murder mystery, in this sense, would be Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur, because nothing’s resolved (and nothing may have taken place). Or Georges Perec’s unfinished final novel, 53 Days, which would have contained at least five levels of books-within-books, and would almost certainly not have been a complete, working, logically closed system like Agathe Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ellery Queen’s Greek Coffin Mystery.

Complexity, in this sense, involves undermining expectations about function and form. Does the watch tell time? Is it even a watch?

A complex novel will undermine a reader’s expectations as it goes. Is this a murder mystery at all? Maybe it’s a memoir, or an autofiction, or a romance… or possibly nothing that’s identifiable. It will keep the reader guessing about form and structure. When does that opening scene in Infinite Jest take place? What kind of thinking—Pietsch’s or Wallace’s—went into the ordering of episodes? The reader will wonder about the author’s control of form. What does it say about Musil’s sense of structure and plot that he has chapters with titles like “Excursion into the Realm of Logic and Morals” or “Explanation and Interruptions of a Normal State of Consciousness”? What kind of structure can we expect of Jon Fosse’s Septology when it has two nearly identical characters with the same name, and others, like Mehrfachgänger (multiple Doppelgängers), waiting in the wings?

So a complex novel is one that keeps you wondering not only about the main characters or the plot, but about the book you’re reading and its author. Part of this has to do with length. Why do they keep going past page 1,000? Does Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling need to be 1,321 pages long? Did Arno Schmidt need to write the equivalent of 6,000 pages about four people taking about Edgar Allan Poe? How did Lucy Ellmann know when she’d told us enough about her character’s thoughts?

But another part, the more important one, has to do with complexity. What does the author think they’re doing? What sort of book do they think they’re writing? Do they imagine their readers can understand everything? Why don’t they settle into a more normal, conventional kind of story—something less complex?

This by way of saying two simple things about complexity:

1. It is something that happens eventually, inevitably, to any book over a certain length. Here I’m only expanding the famous line by Randall Jarrell, “a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it,” which was in turn an echo of Ruskin, whose Fors Clavigera is a model of lack of interest in clear structure.

2. Complexity, in the sense that interests me, means avoiding ordinary form and genre; with the implication that the most truly complex novels do not resemble any earlier novels. Even today there is no consensus about what books in the history of literature precede Finnegans Wake or Zettel’s Traum. When you’re reading a genuinely complex novel, part of your experience is wondering what you’re reading, how it was put together, what justified the author’s choices, and what previous models the author may have had. When you finish it all the guesses you had will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other.

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In A Short Introduction to Anneliese, my own answer to all this, the not-so-slightly demented Anneliese worries about her hundreds of notebooks: is all the work she’s done over the last twenty years actually nonsense? Has she kept control of her massive project, is it readable? She spends a year reading other long books, some fiction—including the world’s longest fan fiction, and several massive books generated by computer—and some nonfiction, such as Aquinas’s Summa theologica and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Her conclusion is my own: how could it be otherwise, since I also spent twenty years writing A Short Introduction to Anneliese and the novels that go with it, and since (unlike, for example, Ottessa Moshfegh or Peter Kien in Elias Canetti’s in Auto-da-fé) I actually read the books Anneliese talks about. Here’s Anneliese’s conclusion to her unrelaxing year of reading long, complex books:

Or, in a word: in fiction, complexity is insanity. Any novel that gives itself the space will eventually wander away from its own structure, its opening mood, its sense of itself. Once a novel goes over a certain length it risks losing rational control, and for me that is the very strong appeal of long, complex books.

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This essay is elaborated from one of the “Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel,” which appeared in the Athenaeum Review.