One ambitious attempt to undo the individual-moral-adventure story was the postmodern systems novel, which intended to depict entire political, social, and technological systems by zooming in and out on figure and ground. The concept was introduced in the late eighties by the critic Tom LeClair, who chose the fiction of Don DeLillo as the quintessential example. LeClair claimed that DeLillo and others, such as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, were using fiction to analyze the complex systems of society, technology, and politics from a structural level. DeLillo’s early novels sketch vast political and corporate conspiracies just beyond the fingertips of the central character, whose individual moral adventure is his paranoid pursuit to comprehend the whole system from shards of evidence. The “system” of the systems novel is never fully revealed, but the reader is given to believe that, behind the scenes, something or someone is pulling the strings.

The term systems novel was maligned by many readers as well as authors themselves, who saw their works as diverse and exploratory rather than reducible to a set of general principles. Yet there are qualities typical of the project: the character of the classic systems novel is a white Western man, as are the majority of the authors themselves. Despite the focus on macrolevel occurrences and interconnectedness, there remains a protagonist: the mystified guy (or guys) at the center. He may feel personally small or powerless, but his experience is the lens through which human experience is meant to be extrapolated. Most of the time, the systems in which he is embroiled are social, technical, and political, rather than ecological, suggesting a separation between the human realm (system) and the natural world (ecosystem). In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the background rather than merge into it.

The story of person-becoming-plant is not about reversal or reversion to some imagined natural state. Instead it provides a counterpoint to any quick-fix, back-to-the-land fantasy, which sees nature as distinct, permanent, unchanging, passive, authentic, and fundamentally good. The idea is not that nature will heal what ails these characters, that they will become natural “again.” On the contrary, it’s about seeing people as always already plant, plant as always already human, and those distinctions as always already weird. Weirdness resists the idea that everything can be explained by humans, but doesn’t give up on the importance of human experience and ability to access and affect the world. This requires some kind of surrender to the unknown, which makes humanity itself an unknown category—whose outlines get messy and whose central importance in the universe is not self-evident.