7 Meta Books That Question the Boundaries of Storytelling

Meta-theatricality isn’t new—even Shakespeare’s characters spoke to the audience—but it is flourishing in our contemporary landscape. Arrested Development commenting on its premature cancellation. Community putting genre under the microscope. Every season of South Park. Hot priest noticing Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s penetration of the fourth wall in Fleabag season 2. The way that I May Destroy You played with multiple endings.

In the 1900s, Brecht believed that art should be confronting rather than comfortable. He never wanted the audience to forget that it was an audience. But where Brecht was didactic, modern examples experiment with style without undermining story, allowing for both immersion and provocation. To me, nothing does this better than literature because of the infinite layers of meaning that can exist within text, like a semantic mille-feuille. A book doesn’t have to hide satire within satire like Yellowface, or experiment with genre like Vonnegut in order to be meta. Because there are no lights and sounds and images to assist with the creation of reality, books already ask more from a reader than a visual art form does of an audience. Like a robot that develops self-awareness and questions its existence before justifying it, literature is inherently sentient. 

My novel What It’s Like in Words follows a toxic relationship, but one of the main themes is the storytelling. Enola is someone who tells herself stories. Daydreaming about the past, the future, and the other worlds that might exist in which she is happier. She is also influenced by the stories that society tells women about what their lives should look like. Therefore, before she can change her reality, she must re-write the narrative in her head. 

Here are seven meta books which question the boundaries of storytelling.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Set across two time periods, after a plague hits North America, we follow those who survived and those who didn’t in a “Tralfamadorian” (or, for a more contemporary reference, think: “This Is Us”) structure. A celebrity actor, a comic book author who never intended her work to be seen, and a child actor, who, as an adult travels through the new North America performing Shakespeare to surviving communities. The two sole copies of the comic, (aptly titled for my argument: Station Eleven), are held by their owners as tightly as weapons, existing as The Guardian hailed as ‘a totem of the old world, and a distorted mirror of the new’.  This isn’t a The Walking Dead style novel about surviving an apocalypse, it’s about how we rebuild after one. What connects the characters, be it a comic or King Lear, is art. 

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Memoir is a genre that straddles fiction and non-fiction through the very act of translating reality, like a self-portrait. Nafisi was a lecturer of literature at the University of Tehran before, during and after the revolution, and war with Iraq. Through the study of literature in her classes, and in the secret book club she is forced to hold, we see the role that art has in shaping a government regime and in surviving one. It’s seen throughout history (and present day), books banned and burned; people keener to destroy literature than weapons. This book doesn’t just put storytelling under a microscope, it puts it on trial as the students debate The Great Gatsby as they might the fate of a person, with Nafisi personifying the book. Regardless of genre, all books are political because they hold up a mirror to a time and a place, and studying them can help us to understand ourselves. Nothing shows this more keenly than the author’s comparison of Lolita to the treatment of women under the new regime in Iran.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

The metafictional premise of The Princess Bride is that it’s Goldman’s re-writing of fictitious book The Princess Bride originally written by fictitious writer, S. Morgenstern. It is a book within a book that allows Goldman to interrogate storytelling in a way that never takes itself too seriously. He interrupts the story with criticisms of the grammar and explanations as to why he has cut superfluous historical exposition, dropping tongue-in- cheek industry lingo like: ‘Denise, the copyeditor’. The juxtaposition between the jaded humour, not dissimilar to Heller or Vonnegut, and the heart on its sleeve plot is a perfectly balanced cocktail. Characters say what they mean in a way that only a book pretending to be a fairy tale can get away with. As children, our first exposure to books is often fairy tales. That is why Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is so brilliant. By subverting something formative, we are examining what it means to tell stories, and in Goldman’s case, what it means to be a storyteller. The Princess Bride provokes in a very different way to The Bloody Chamber, but it is still provocative. As Uncut states, it is: “One of the most laconic, tightly-plotted tales of mythical morality you’ll ever read, an anti-establishment satire disguised as a love story, more of a scary tale than a fairy tale.”

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Taddeo claims to have spent eight years crossing America, spending months with the women that she made the characters in her nonfiction novel.  These are three women’s real-life experiences with love and desire. This isn’t art imitating life, it’s art recreating it as precisely as it can in words. One of the three women even uses her real name because she wanted her story to be heard. As opposed to the other books on this reading list, which remind us of what they are, this is a book which hides in its form, camouflaged in prose. We forget that we are reading nonfiction because the stories are so engaging, the prose is so devastating, and the characters feel so real they must be fiction. 

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

One of my favourite aspects of this novel is its form. Our main protagonist is written in third person, while our secondary characters are in first person. We flit from dreams to reality, from poems to politics, past to present, art to history. We are guided through a story that is as epic as it is one man’s battle with grief and addiction. Our main protagonist, Cyrus, is writing a poetry book about martyrs which is a telling focus for someone as lost as he is- people so confident in what they believe in that they are willing to die for it- when his research puts him in the path of a woman making art out of her death in the Brooklyn Museum. This is a book that looks at art as a way to make meaning out of what might be meaningless and the form never lets us forget this. We are always reminded of the storytelling, like watching a play where the wings are visible and we can see stage management calling the show. We want to know how the story ends, and we want to know how the writer ends the story. 

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

Written in 1969, this story is dressed up as a Victorian love story; the characters are unaware that they were created years after the time in which they exist. Not dissimilar to Goldman in The Princess Bride, Fowles lifts the disguise whenever he sees fit. At one point he adds an Asterix to explain that although he had used the word ‘agnostic’, the term wasn’t actually coined until 1870. It’s no coincidence that the central character of Charles is interested in Darwin as we are always reminded of the evolution of time. Chapter one is from the perspective of someone looking through a telescope at two people on the coast of Lyme Bay as they might study a fossil. Fowles even gives the story alternative endings which caused the Guardian to call it “A Shaggy Dog story”. A Shaggy Dog joke is a joke which goes on and on without a punch line, and in the case of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the joke is on us as we are reminded that the characters that Fowles made us care for (and we do care for them) are fiction, and he is the one holding up that telescope all the way from 1969.

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

How to Be Both challenges the binaries that dominate our understanding of the world. It has a dual narrative, following an Italian renaissance artist and a contemporary London teenager. Smith’s commentary on storytelling extends past the words on the page to the physical book itself as the novel either begins with George’s narrative or with Francesco’s depending on which you pick up. Therefore, as Francesco reaches through time and space to have visions of George, depending on whose narrative you read first, the moment of understanding for the reader, will happen at a different point in the book, brilliantly demonstrating the role of the reader in a novel’s meaning. Here, art is as crucial as science, and to borrow a Strasberg quote, is: longer than life.