In its investigative premise, the novel evokes a classic detective story that moves forward and backward. Ideally, the search forward in the present eventuates in a reliable linear reconstruction of the past. Not so in The Flanders Road. Instead, Simon creates a world of fluid, multidimensional time. Time stops, starts, contracts, expands, repeats itself, multiplies strata, plunges into subjectivity, assumes mechanical chronometry, and more. As Georges observes, an instant in reality can be like “when you dream that so many things are happening and when you open your eyes again the clock’s hand has scarcely moved at all.” Temporal planes intersect in unexpected, involuntary ways. A prewar day at the racetrack overlaps with the memory of the ambush. As Georges makes love to Corinne his imagination returns to his chaotic battlefield escape. In the POW camp Georges warns his fellow interpreter Blum that he was “mixing it all up,” that he was confusing the life of an eighteenth-century Reixach with his great-grandson.

While the vertigo induced by the quest undermines traditional plotting, it also produces alternative forms of patterning that create the novel’s elegant, if elusive shape. As the nouveau roman theorist and an early advocate of the novel Ricardou observed in 1967, the work has a “hidden but nonetheless rigorous coherence.” In the broadest sense, it not only decomposes plot but “deploys a world in the process of complete disintegration.” This includes different regimes of order: military, social, mechanical, spatial, temporal, physical, physiological, and genealogical. It is all coming apart. If there is a single image in the novel that embodies the overall disintegration it is “what was not a rough mass of dried mud but . . . a horse, or rather what had been a horse.” The decomposing horse appears multiple times as Georges passes by it in his confused efforts to escape capture. Opposing the forces of decomposition are images, symbols, motifs of potential reintegration. Events yield to “radiating” clusters offering “semantic polyphony.” Simon offers an image of the overall structure: “I wanted to construct my book like a cloverleaf, with a center and three unequal loops. The dead horse is the center of the cloverleaf.” In writing the opening section of the novel, he used different-colored pens to track and visualize the tight weave of disparate materials he offers as an overture, a kind of reader’s manual for the rest of the novel. Narrative decomposition transmutes to poetic recomposition, if the reader accepts the offer.