His writing has been called ambitiously experimental and his narrative structure is described as "multiple and flexible." Common metafiction framing techniques in his novels include dreams and dreams within dreams (such as in the "Guyana Quartet" (1985) and "The Dark Jester" (2001)), tropes from epic poetry, found or received archival material (such as the asylum journals analyzed by the narrator in "The Waiting Room" (1966) or "The Angel at the Gate"(1982), or the papers of Idiot Nameless in "Companions of the Day and Night" (1975)), and the repeated use of the same characters across different novel-universes (such as the da Silva twins from "Palace", who reappear throughout the oeuvre, for example in "Da Silva Da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness" (1977)).