Metafiction and the Postmodern Page Turner

I was delighted with Kevin Nance’s piece in the Chicago Sun Times last weekend, when he said, 

as a metafiction, The Heroines allows Favorite to spoof the conventions of fairy tales and 19th century women’s literature; the prairie around Anne-Marie’s house shares distinct characteristics with the moor in Wuthering Heights, while the nearby forest, where Penny first encounters Conor, feels soaked in the mystery and enchantment of the Brothers Grimm.” 

He’s one of the first to see the way I’m playing with literary conventions.  Penny’s running smack into all the romantic notions of girlhood (the dashing stranger, the danger of the Woods), and yet she’s an anti-Heroine/anti-Princess herself–bratty, awkward, a bastard–not “to the manor born.”  Her castle, the Prairie Homestead, relies on commerce (a B & B) for survival. 

 Nance also understood the postmodern and metafictional aspects of The Heroines.  The fabulous experimental poet Daniel Borzutzky once asked if I felt nervous appropriating characters from other novels.  For the most part, I modeled Flann O’Brien’s playfulness in At-Swim-Two-Birds and didn’t take the characters too seriously.  By calling authors “despotic” in their use and abuse of characters, O’Brien essentially takes all authors down a peg, revealing how we work: we just have to keep making life harder for our characters.  I did have to rein in my use of Franny Glass, since her story’s still under copyright.   I even deleted a section where she reappears late in my novel, because those of the legal/litigious persuasion deemed my use unfair and equal to a sequel.  Jonathan Lethem, in an essay in Harper’s, asserted that all writers should have free rein with each others’ characters.  Is nothing new in fiction?   I wonder how I would feel if Penny appeared in somebody else’s novel.  . .

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