Fiction

In my more curmudgeonly moments, I get angry that books aren't better written/edited so as to make the plot easier to follow.

Then again, if plots were easier to follow than they generally are now, lazy readers like us would probably adapt to even THAT, and find even THAT standard to be unacceptable, as well.

Seriously though, I do think it's certainly NOT a prerequisite that a book must have many different things going on in order to be good. Some of the simplest books are some of the best-known and most well-loved classics (Animal Farm, for example).

That said, if there ARE many different things going on, there are ways of writing that make it all come together better than just sort of jumping from one thing to another, willy-nilly. For example, writing about a family can be exploited as a device in order to write about current issues relating to gender, in the sense that the family's size can be tailored in order to accommodate as many or as few issues as an author wishes to deal with; and since most people have families, they can relate well to 'black sheep' or pillars and the issues they are dealing with, rather than some random people who don't know each other, and bear no relation (literal or figurative) to each other.