Usually only in retrospect when it gains cult status. Look towards the likes of Hunter S Thomson, Charles Bukowski, John Fante. But the definition of 'plot' is so subjective it almost voids the question. I know this sounds dismissive, but it's anything but. It's a question I've asked myself and find very interesting.
Maybe The catcher in the rye too? The reason I'm asking this is because I'm reading Raymond Carver's Will you please be quiet, please and it made me wonder whether it would have been possible for him to accomplish in a novel as much as he does in his short stories.
The 'success' of a novel boils down to one simple question: Did its readers enjoys it enough to keep turning the pages until the end? If the answer is yes, the contents of that book are irrelevant. But as I say, 'plot' is so subjective. What you or I may consider plotless, others would argue is plot in every sense of the word.
Never read anything plotless. Though I did read a book with more continuity issues than I cared for. Seems keeping shit straight was not the authors forte. Though I suppose there are books out there that lack a clear focus. I know there are series out there that do.
How much plot needs to be plot? In a lot of the books I read, the "plot" is entirely character driven. Cujo was just a mother and son sitting in a car with a big dog outside.
According to Wiki there was a bit more to it than that " The story takes place in the setting of numerous King works: the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Revolving around two local families, the narrative is interspersed with vignettes from the seemingly mundane lives of various other residents. There are no chapter headings but breaks in between passages to indicate when the narration switches to a different point of view. The principal characters are the Trenton and the Camber families. The middle-class Trentons have recently moved to Castle Rock from New York City, bringing with them their four-year-old son, Tad. Father, Vic, discovers that his wife, Donna, has recently concluded an affair. In the midst of this household tension, Vic's advertising agency is failing, and he is forced to travel out of town, leaving Tad and Donna at home. The blue-collar Cambers are longtime residents; Joe is a mechanic who dominates and abuses his wife, Charity, and their ten-year-old son, Brett. Charity wins a $5,000 lottery prize and uses the proceeds to trick Joe into allowing her to take Brett on a trip to visit Charity's sister, Holly, in Connecticut. Joe acquiesces, secretly planning to use the time to take a pleasure trip to Boston. Cujo, the Camber's large, good-natured St. Bernard, chases a wild rabbit in the fields around their house and inserts his head in the entrance to a small limestone cave, where a rabid bat bites him on the nose and infects him with the virus. While Charity and Brett leave town, Cujo kills their alcoholic neighbor, Gary Pervier. When Joe returns home, Cujo kills him as well. Donna, home alone with Tad, takes their failing Ford Pinto to the Cambers' for repairs. The car breaks down in Camber's dooryard, and as Donna attempts to find Joe, Cujo appears and attacks her. She climbs back in the car as Cujo starts to attack. Donna and Tad are trapped in their vehicle, the interior of which becomes increasingly hot in the sun. During one escape attempt, Donna is bitten in the stomach and leg but manages to survive and escape back into the car. She plans to run for the house, but abandons the idea due to her fears that the door will be locked, and that she will be subsequently killed by Cujo, leaving her son alone. Vic returns to Castle Rock after several failed attempts to contact Donna and learns from the police that Steve Kemp, the man with whom Donna was having an affair, is suspected of ransacking his home and possibly kidnapping Donna and Tad. To explore all leads, the state police send Castle Rock Sheriff George Bannerman out to the Cambers' house, but Cujo attacks and kills him. Donna, after witnessing the attack and realizing Tad is in danger of dying of dehydration, battles Cujo and kills him. Vic arrives on the scene with the authorities soon after, but Tad has already died from exposure. Donna is rushed to the hospital, and Cujo's head is removed for a biopsy prior to cremation of his remains. The novel ends several months later with both the Trenton and Camber families trying to go on with their lives: Donna has completed her treatment for rabies, her marriage with Vic has survived, and Charity gives Brett a new, vaccinated puppy named Willie. A postscript reminds the reader that Cujo was a good dog who always tried to keep his owners happy, but the ravage of rabies drove him to violence. A sub-plot of Cujo involves the young son Tad being haunted by the ghost of Frank Dodd, who appears in the King novel The Dead Zone. In Cujo, Dodd's ghost inhabits Tad's closet, causing him to have horrifying nightmares where Dodd opens the closet door at night, taunting Tad that Dodd will eat him alive and kill him. Later in the book, Tad's mother begins to smell strange animal odors in the closet and at one point Tad's father passes through a mystical door in the rear of the closet, thereafter entering a shadow world which appears as a deep forest with caves in which Tad and his mother are hiding from a horrible clawed and fanged monster" Apparently according to on writing King wrote this book while off his face on cocaine and barely remembers writing it
I'm listening to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack right now and it's reminded me was an absolute genius Tarantino is with dialogue. The relevance here is that Tarantino uses dialogue that, if included in the first draft of a novel, most editors would probably tell you to lose. Filler, they'd call it. It has nothing to do with the plot, they'd say. But Tarantino can write a scene where two men are discussing burgers of all things, and make it absolutely mesmerising.
I feel like a big scary dog looming somewhere in the dark is already a lot of plot. Yes, and if those dialogues were inserted in a story that completely lacked, well, plot, they'd probably be disposable.
Yeah, but that's a movie. Lots is going on outwith the dialogue. Even if it's just a soundtrack, you have the differing voices, the inflections of speech, maybe meaningful pauses or rushed words. And in the movie you also have the physical presence of the characters, their facial expressions and body language, the setting in the background that might even be actively changing. NONE of that is present in a novel unless the novelist recreates it somehow. It's why I worry when people like to compare movies with books, using movies as a guide to writing books. What they tend to produce is flat, dialogue-heavy pages. Pages and pages of words that get the pages flipped quickly enough, but comprehension and engagement levels just aren't there. Nor are visuals. Novels and movies are two different storytelling mediums, and the techniques they use aren't really interchangeable.
Handmaid's Tale, perhaps? The whole thing was pretty much a tour through Offred's world and not much else...
I would agree that what you would call a 'plot' is entirely subjective. The 'plot' may simply be two people walking and talking, but it is still a 'plot'. But I think I get the point of the question, a novel that is more driven by ideas or characters than a the story. Maybe something like 'On the Road' would be a good example of an interesting novel without a 'plot' as such, or maybe 'zen, and the art of motorcycle maintenance'?
