Mosaic novel
Jo Walton, in the foreward for China Mountain Zhang, discusses the difference between books of interconnected short stories vs. mosaic novels.
A normal novel tells a story by going straightforwardly at it, maybe with different points of view, maybe braided, but clearly going down one road of story. A mosaic novel builds up a picture of a world and a story obliquely, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Per Joe McDermott, a mosaic novel fractures one or more story elements: plot, theme, characters, and/or setting, but then one of these elements binds the various story threads together and keeps the reader anchored in the tale as a whole.
That’s already mixing metaphors, which is why I like the term tapestry novel too, the weaving together of many different threads into a whole.
Kurt Vonnegut claimed that his books “are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips… and each chip is a joke.”1