But that's the thing.
Take Gravity's Rainbow. You start off reading it thinking "an intricate plot, a cast of thousands, but I can handle this" … as you would, say, a George RR Martin or a Hilary Mantel novel.
But as it continues, you realise you can't really reconcile all the facts of the book, and that huge swathes of plot and character aren't leading up to anything, and won't eventually be justified by the harmonious return of other, disparate plot elements. Realism gives way to feverish hallucinations and weird, long sexual digressions.
The characters are ciphers, half the men and women just seem to be variants of one another whose differences only trace the outline of the underlying types of male and female. Characters end up inside toilet S-bends, or having other bizarre experiences. Organisations and technologies and substances turn out to be interconnected in weird ways.
That's what makes it great. I found Inherent Vice did a decent job of it, I mean it's a "minor" work compared to Gravity's Rainbow, but it probably needed to be to stand half a chance of adaptation.
