“Mine is quite the opposite of the attitude of the God-like novelist,” Simon remarks in a 1985 interview. “The novelist today tries to make his way through a kind of fog; it isn’t really a question of irony, but one of vertigo: he just doesn’t know the answers. You are faced, as always, with the unknown, the unknowable.” Simon may be frustrated by the inability to produce any definitive answer, but, rather than crushing his artistic will, the situation inspires him to keep “trying to make his way.” This restless energy and tireless search help to explain how story, style, character, and structure work in The Flanders Road.

In fact, the novel is neither plotless nor without human actors. Simon begins with ingredients of traditional stories but subjects them to the pressures of a repeated refrain: “How can you tell, how can you tell?” The central event of the novel is the death of the cavalry officer Captain de Reixach in an ambush as observed by his younger, distant cousin Georges, who by coincidence has been assigned to his relative’s squadron. Events before and after the ambush are spread across the novel as Georges tries to discover what brought his cousin to his death. Was it the bad luck of war or was it a disguised suicide with origins in his marriage and family history? Or, even, something yet unknown? A self-appointed detective, Georges gathers evidence from many sources. There is Iglésia, the captain’s groom who was also in his employ as a jockey before the war and may have been the lover of his young wife, Corinne. After the war Corinne becomes briefly Georges’s lover and has her own version of what happened. Blum, a fellow prisoner of war with Georges, doubles as a detective, helping Georges assemble stories and consider interpretations. Georges’s mother, Sabine, provides a longer-term view of the Reixach family dynasty and its history of ambiguous deaths, including another possible, yet unproven, suicide. Other informants and sources come and go wearing various credentials of reliability.