Admirers of The White Hotel will find that the technique of that pseudo-novel (the term implies no disparagement) has been put to a similar use [in Ararat]—meaning that long stretches of verse, documentary facts about atrocities, journeys that get nowhere, insertions that look like pastiche but are straight translation, are in the service less of a structure than of an artfully deceptive object. The object—measurable and weighable—is a book, and the book looks like a novel. Indeed, it sometimes reads like a novel, but it is no more a novel than was The White Hotel….

Let me put it this way: if Madame Bovary and The Great Gatsby and The Rainbow are novels, then Ararat is a sort of poem. What matters in fiction is character and the action that character begets: things happen, people change, tentative conclusions are reached. What matters in Ararat is...