John Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman" ?

It is deliberately confusing. The book has alternative endings, as well as ambiguities reaching further back into the story.

The idea is that the author has largely abdicated control, and given the reader 'ownership' of the text - a pretence I find absurd. Questioning the role of the author and pretending that the characters have taken on a life of their own does not really work, despite the pretentious existentialist slant Fowles gives to it.

Now this questioning of the author's role is dishonest and manipulative. Fowles is in control throughout: it is by his will and no-one else's that alternative endings are presented. If the characters develop a "life of their own", that life begins and ends in the author's brain. He, and no-one else, has shaped them.

Notably, in all the ambiguities of the novel (and they reach back into the fictional past as well; they are not confined to the ending) we are presented with an authorial voice, an authorial attitude towards the society his novel is set in, which are designed to limit and guide the reader's responses.

We are accustomed to this in the traditional novel, where it is avowedly part of the genre. It is hard, for instance, to feel much sympathy for Mr. Collins. In a novel which (implicitly throughout, explicitly in places) disclaims the writer's authority, it will not do. It is simply annoying - like a schoolteacher who says "Present your own opinions, and say this and this and this in your essay."

I have not mentioned the inaccuracies, inconsistencies and simple historical mistakes (clearly accidental and not deliberate) which pepper the text. The book, I believe, is sloppily written and constructed: a bad novel which had a certain trendy vogue but is now almost unread. Why it should still commonly be set for study when there are so many better novels to read is beyond me

That book is soooo KINKY!!