Some novels are written as if they are a portfolio, or a gallery, of paintings, a photo album full of snapshots, or a collection of short stories which have been organised so as to tell an overall narrative. I have read a few of these recently and they had very different effects on me. I want to try and understand why this was so.
All three of the novels is told from multiple perspectives, each section being narrated as if from the point of view of a different character. All three jump backwards and forwards in time so that the sequencing of the extracts is less to do with chronology and more to do with the structure of the story. The one in which this is most obvious is Notes from an Exhibition in which the impetus of the book is driven by the reader wanting to know what happened to Petroc, the child who died. (Links are to my reviews on Dave's Book Blog)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. This jumps backwards and forwards in time (and has one rather brilliant) section which is told as a sort of PowerPoint presentation. It won the Pulitzer in 2011 so it was highly regarded; she said she was aiming at "polyphony" and that she was influenced by Proust (who also jumps around in time). I found it difficult to read, describing it as "literary tag". I think what was hard was the number of characters. In this sort of situation you start with a story with just a few characters but the next story has different characters (though usually overlapping) and unless you are very careful you can end up with a large cast but not a single one of them dwelt upon sufficiently to really develop them. And then a character occurs which you have a vague feeling that you have met before (though possibly, since the chronology isn't linear, this is a character you met before but in the future) but you can't find them again because at the time you first encountered them you didn't pay them that much attention because you weren't sure if they were key or transient.
Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward. This was very similar in structure to the Egan novel but I think I enjoyed it more because the number of characters was better controlled.
Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale. The premise of the structure for this book was the central character being an artist and each section was introduced by the notes for a picture in a post-mortem retrospective exhibition of her work. This was the most successful of the three and I think that was because the central cast (the artist, her sister, and her four children) was so carefully controlled.
So my initial response is that the success or failure of a novel, for me, is dictated by whether there is a cast of characters small enough for me to keep tabs on. My novel Motherdarling is told from multiple perspective though it is a chronologically sequential narrative and I deliberately kept to just four central characters (though there are another 5 who have walk-on parts).
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