I don't know.... ever read anything by L. Ron Hubbard? I think he could probably give Brown a run for his money re: being the worst writer among best sellers.
For a
good book that covers a complex construct along the lines of what Brown was shooting for in his work, give
New York Trilogy by Paul Auster a shot. The first story in that,
City of Glass, is my favorite. It combines the device of an unreliable narrator (one of Herman Melville's favorite tricks) with an exploration of the nature of identity, and the relationship between perception, knowledge, language and sanity.
Auster is a great line-by-line writer, but what really gets me is the depth of the world he creates in stories like
City of Glass. You have to do some
serious thinking/planning, and probably a hell of a lot of research, just to conceive of a story like that in the first place, much less to execute it in a way that is intellectually compelling and viscerally entertaining at the same time.