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Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that the focus of the short story is plot while the true subject of the novel is character. As for its plot, which is thoroughly realistic, Madame Bovary barrels straight downhill: Emma and Charles meet and marry, she has several affairs, then sinks the family into horrendous debt, with inescapable consequences. From its opening pages, the story exudes a powerful sense of inevitability.

The novel's fame, however, depends, not on story but on character, and a style radically innovative for its time. Set in Normandy between 1827 and 1846 (and published in 1857), it gained instant notoriety, assisted by an obscenity charge and acquittal.

Under their multitudinous layers of clothing, Flaubert's characters have the pulse of life. Charles Bovary is a dull carp of a husband, a cuckold for the ages. Homais, the apothecary in the rural village of Yonville, where the action takes place, is a puffed-up bourgeois whose bloated opinions on science and religion are made known to everyone within earshot. Rodolphe, Emma Bovary's first lover, is a landowner and serial womanizer. Léon, lover No. 2, is a young clerk with lamentable romantic tendencies. There's the devious merchant; the priest; the father of Emma and the mother of Charles; the many servants and minor characters. In every case, the reader can smell the mud on their boots, the perfume in their hair.

And then there is Emma. The first time we see her, she's sucking blood from her pricked fingers. Blood and the colour red pervade the novel, along with a relentless, urgent eroticism. Emma Bovary is a profoundly sentimental woman, a fatally deluded romantic — and beautiful. All joy is linked in her mind with luxurious objects, rich clothing, exotic locales. And yet Emma embodies something irresistible. She has energy, boundless, voracious, feminine. She wants to swallow life whole (death, too).

Madame Bovary had no precursors, was radically original. In a letter Flaubert sent to his mistress, Louise Colet, in 1852, while writing the novel, he said, "What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of its style …"

One aspect of that style was an acute attention to detail. The fulsome descriptions of food and clothing at the Bovary wedding, or the hotel room in Rouen where her trysts with Léon take place, reflect to perfection prevalent bourgeois obsessions. It is a novel constructed of details, as if the thrust of the story were an avalanche of objects gaining speed as they rumbled downhill to the dénouement, and that somehow they were pulling the characters along with them.

At the same time, every detail fits, each adds to the whole, nothing is wasted. The inevitability of the plot resonates with the inevitability of the words chosen. The novel feels like a world built up out of atomic particles, following an ineluctable yet mysterious order.

Years before Freud began mapping our psyches, Madame Bovary was the first novel to explore seriously the psychology of its characters. We know what Emma Bovary thinks and feels, what drives her. We sense her longing, her desires, her frustrations, her anger and her boredom.

There is also a stunning filmic quality to Flaubert's scenes. When Charles and Emma's marriage procession walks across the countryside to the mayor's office, we first see it from a distance, a line of celebrants led by a fiddler snaking through the fields. Then Flaubert zooms in to reveal how Emma picks thistles off her long gown with gloved fingers, "as Charles waited empty-handed beside her." Over and over, Flaubert's eye gives us scenes fresh and alive with pertinent detail.

An artist so obsessed he would roll around on the floor in agony for days seeking le mot juste and the perfect rhythm for each scene, Flaubert, in the end, gave us a novel of pure style. Flaubert showed us there was such a thing as art for art's sake, that how something was said was far more important than what was said. In this way, he was the precursor of Joyce, Beckett, Sartre, Borges, Duras and many others; and Emma Bovary's line eventually begat Molly Bloom.

Mark Frutkin is the author of the Trillium Award-winning novel, "Fabrizio's Return." His non-fiction work, "Erratic North: A Vietnam Draft Resister's Life in the Canadian Bush," will be out this fall.