People are always looking for stories to sweep them away, to help them escape. There’s not inherently anything wrong with that, though sometimes I worry about taking that impulse to an extreme. When does immersion in a story start being harmful, both to the creators but also to the readers, viewers, and fans as well?
My new novel, The Franchise, imagines a fantasy film series that has taken the escapism mantra seriously. Unfortunately, since it’s owned by a growth-obsessed corporation, that means expanding the series beyond the bounds of mere films and into something like The Truman Show: a living set of the films’ world populated with characters acting out stories and scenarios in the world of the franchise (and being filmed). Fans can pay to have their memories altered and then live in this world – truly escape into it. Of course, there’s a cost to that.
I think the impulse to create stories that envelop us entirely is worth a little push back, which is why I always appreciate books that bounce up against the limits of their fictional constructs. These are books that are aware that the story, and the text itself, is not real, but that doesn’t mean that they think the story or the words don’t matter. Indeed, it’s often the case that the more metafictional a book is, the more urgent and serious it takes its mission to tell its story.
Here are some novels that engage with this metafictional impulse in various and often surprising ways.
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Alright, yes, I am starting this list off with a heavy hitter, the first novel in the modern sense. But it’s such a good choice because Don Quixote shows how metafiction is baked into the novel’s form from the very start. Everyone knows the basic story: Quixote, an aging rich man, goes crazy after reading too many medieval romances, believes himself to be an actual knight, and enlists his servant Sancho Panza to accompany him on a quest. He fights windmills, they get into several scraps, etc. But it’s really in the book’s second half (which is actually a sequel) where the metafictional conceit takes off. Quixote has become famous within the world of the novel, much as the novel had become famous in early 17th-century Spain. In fact, other people have written unauthorized continuations of Quixote’s story, both in real life and in the book, but this is the actual account. You see where this is going. Combined with several novels-within-novels, Quixote is the first and maybe ultimate example of the novel’s inability to be about anything other than itself.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Many of Vonnegut’s novels include metafictional elements: fourth-wall breaking asides, author-insert characters, references to other books in the author’s bibliography. But none is as brazen about it as Breakfast of Champions, which is as much a diary of Vonnegut’s opinions, observations, fears, and drawings (the book is filled with his doodles) as it is a story. But even the plot itself is drenched in self-awareness, as Kilgore Trout – a frequent character in many of Vonnegut’s books, a hack science fiction writer who publishes his stories exclusively in pornographic magazines – goes on a journey across the country toward a fateful meeting with Dwayne Hoover, a used car salesman and a distillation of a sort of MAGA energy decades before such a thing was really crystallized. The book almost comes completely apart at the end: it’s less a story than it is an opportunity for Vonnegut to vamp. But it’s also a howl of rage and anger about America, its failed promises, and the people hurt along the way.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Though in many ways a traditional work of literary fiction (a series of stories of various quasi-connected people over a period of many years, with a bit of it set in the near future), Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel remains acutely aware of the reader’s perspective throughout, slowly building out its world not through the logic of plot but that of character. It’s a book about the passage of time and middle age, but in its final sections it also experiments with storytelling itself. There is a long chapter told in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. These series of slides are one young girl’s attempts to make sense of her family and her autistic brother, who enjoys cataloging songs with “pauses.” The book is both incredibly moving and also a commentary on how the stories we tell about ourselves are processed, received, and communicated.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
A classic high-concept from one of the 20th-century’s greatest science fiction writers, this story set in a world where the Axis Powers won World War II is not really about politics or alternate history, at least not in the way you may assume given the logline. There’s plenty of great alternate histories out there (Harry Turtledove has made his career of it), but Dick’s novel is much more about storytelling itself, and how storytelling has the power to shape what we believe is possible. There’s a novel-within-the-novel here, which is also an alternative history, but an alternate history asking “What if the Axis lost?” In other words, our world. Or is it? There’s a lot of layers of reality and unreality in this book, and a little bit of inter-dimensional travel, too.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
No academic definition of modernism or postmodern would include Christie and her over 70 mystery novels, despite her long career chronologically overlapping with both movements, but there are very few authors of her or any age as attuned to the expectations and desires of their readers, and maybe no one as good as surprising those readers. A good mystery novel, after all, is both completely aware of itself as a work of genre while constantly working to invisibly circumvent the readers’ own predictions and preconceptions. Not unlike, say, Ulysses. Perhaps no novel of Christie’s does this as blatantly, however, thanThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a fairly early Hercule Poirot mystery that puts the Belgian detective in a small English town in the middle of multiple crimes and conspiracies. The novel is told in the first person from the point of view of the local doctor, and it’s here that Christie allows herself to be quite clever and innovative with the plot, its telling, and the unraveling of the mystery. I won’t say too much more so as not to spoil it, but it’s very much a book about the text itself, and the reader’s relationship to it.
In some ways, McEwan’s most famous book is the perfect pairing with Christie’s. It is best read cold, without any knowledge of what you are getting yourself into. Unfortunately, since it was made into a prestigious Hollywood film and is a bestseller itself, that’s somewhat hard to do. But if all you know is that it’s something about World War II and a romance across British class lines then you are in for a treat. McEwan does tell that story, but he’s simultaneously telling another one, and it’s not until the book’s conclusion where we realize that what we have been reading is actually different than what we thought. The film doesn’t capture this dynamic correctly. Without ruining the ending, let’s just say that the meta-textual twist doesn’t translate across mediums. But McEwan’s book is worth it even if you know the major outlines of the plot, since the metafictional nature of his story is more than just a gimmick but a profound and touching way for one character to address a lifetime of guilt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas Elrod lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter. His writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Independent Weekly, and elsewhere. The Franchise is his first novel.