I am always suspicious when novels are described as “plotless.” I am not suspicious of the novels themselves, but rather the people who use the word. My suspicion, I suppose, stems from the novels in question being described apophatically—in terms of what they aren’t. It always seems to be a negatory framing of a novel to say it “has no plot.” What does it have? On more than one occasion I have seen the word used derisively, as though “plotlessness” is somehow a failing.

I didn’t consider plot when writing my own novel, Absence. I couldn’t. I knew nothing of the book until it was done. Plotting, for me, is a retroactive action—only once the thing is formed can I think about the shape of the work, cast the throughline of it. I did do this, eventually; eventually, I plotted out the novel.

My qualm with this whole plotting business comes from the fact that I often feel the label to be pejorative; to focus on plot, or its “absence” is often to lazily discount, or ignore all the other choices, explorations and observations made within the text. Whether it is the ambient trappings of the everyday; the lengthy, essayistic digressions of the narrator; the associative logic of observation and thought; the tracing of one’s own journey through the world; or simply (usually complexly) one’s interior monologue, one’s stream of language that silently sounds in the mind. These are all important aspects of a novel, and of course, of life too. And yet, at times, the term “plotless” is slung around the neck of a novel like a millstone and all those other things seem to vanish with it.

If plot is simply the sequence of events, then I would argue that all of the following books—although described at times as “plotless,” a term I am ironically employing here—are rigorously plotted. Perhaps not in a conventional manner, but, instead, in circuitous, faltering, wondrous, rambling, lapsing and stuttering ways. Every good book creates a new way for us to see, and sometimes that has nothing to do with plot. In fact, it rarely does. In an attempt to reclaim the term “plotless,” I’ve gathered seven books that epitomize what books that are not focused on delivering the reader from A to B, but rather from D to Z to C to M to D again, can achieve.

Strangers Who Talk by Xandra Bingley

This hybrid novel by British writer Xandra Bingley is a beautiful meditation on witnessing and listening. It is a novel about words, about language, about stories; it is the ultimate flâneuse novel, but it is also a series of monologues, of fragmented conversations, of the overheard things otherwise forgotten. As Margaret Atwood (who writes the introduction) says: “It is social reportage, the eye at the keyhole, the ear at the door?” Whether we are overhearing the crowds the night before Princess Diana’s funeral, or following the story of an aging jockey racing in the dusty heat of Miami, Bingley’s inventive prose surges like a stream—in torrents in parts and trickles in others. In Strangers Who Talk, Bingley presents us with voices she has rescued from the edge of oblivion.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson

Where is memory located? Where is history located? Are they in a toaster? Or a dead squirrel? In looking at both the domestic and natural world, the narrator of this brief and poignant novel slips in and out of digressions, recollections, and reflections on the histories of political violence, her own personal life and also the lives (and deaths) of her neighbours. A former foreign correspondent, Lara Pawson brings lightness, knowledge and sensitivity to her subject matter, reminding us that although it is within us, remembrance is possible in all that surrounds us too.

The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul

In this dreamlike novel by the Trinidadian Nobel laureate, our narrator (who somewhat resembles the author) traces his own life’s journey from Port of Spain to Oxford, and finally to the Wiltshire countryside. Without revealing much about himself, he hypnotically observes the patterns of life and death in both the land and people around him. It is the story of the making of a great writer, a deeply pastoral novel with extraordinarily beautiful passages on the British countryside, and a psychological novel about the inhabitants of the land and the endless cycle of change, growth, and decay they are all trapped within.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman

“The fact that…” is the quasi-Beckettian refrain of this epic yet hermetic novel. It is the anchor point, the metronomic beat to the associative drift of this Ohio housewife’s inner-most musings as she goes about her daily life. There is a telescopic-microscopic aspect to this novel’s focus—our narrator might zoom in on someone not having done laundry only to begin reflecting on the dire state of politics in the United States, then bake apple turnovers. Taking from the endless tangle of information we are laden with daily, Ellman has formed a transcendent, universal, and devastatingly human novel.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

In this interwar novel from 1939, we follow Sasha, a wounded, middle-aged woman fleeing London for Paris in the hopes of leaving behind the pain of her husband abandoning her. But nightly, as she wanders through the darkling, winding streets of Paris, in and out of bars, restaurants and bordellos, she sinks deeper into abject desperation and depression. From the dim shards of this subtle and piercing novel, we learn no matter how we try, how far we go, or what we do, escape is not always possible.

Inland by Gerald Murnane

This is a novel which seems to follow two narrators, although it is not entirely clear if they are distinct from each other. The first is situated in a nameless village near the Great Hungarian Plains writing something for an editor who lives on a prairie in South Dakota. Most of this section follows the thoughts, fantasies, and reflections the narrator has about his editor and her husband. The second narrator (if they are indeed distinct) seems to be in Australia (and very much resembles Murnane) as he recounts his childhood with a particular focus on the story of “the girl from Bendigo street.” Much of this novel’s narrative drive comes from the complex repetition of certain images and leitmotifs—ponds, landscapes, windows—which stack upon each other slowly, dreamily, to establish a gossamer logic that is as moving and evocative as it is vanishing and lucent.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

This novel-in-parts is comprised of twenty stories told to us by the same woman living on the peripheries of a rural village. The opening story begins with the narrator recounting a time when she was a little girl and clambered into a garden to fall asleep. The rest of the book, however, largely revolves around the day-to-day life of our narrator: whether she is taking a walk through a field, reflecting on a character in a novel she is reading, or sleeping beside one of her partners. There is a diaristic quality to some of the writing, which is set off by other stories that are deeply novelistic. It is an enchanting novel about the natural world and our place, or lack thereof, within it.