Just as the novel is technically complicated, so is it hard to put it into any genre, although Frederica's story is not particularly unusual; many mainstream novels are about the troubles women have with their marriages. Babel Tower is a literary novel that contains elements of experimental fiction seen in other work throughout the century. Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for example, moves from the point of view of one character to another and presents how they exist in different worlds within the same geographical region, something that Babel Tower also does. Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987; see separate entry) has a narrative that is fragmented and more discontinuous than either novel. Ava (1993), by the American writer Carol Maso, has passages and quotations from other writers woven in with its narrative, a literary technique which was used by T. S. Eliot in 1922 in his long...