A metafictional novel that inverts the staples of contemporary women's fiction
Since long before “meta” became a standalone adjective, writers have written about writers. In her latest, Our Tragic Universe, Scarlett Thomas doubles down on this conceit by writing about a writer who writes about herself and argues with friends about famous writers’ writing instruction. (Meta bonus: She also reviews books.) Novels with such an involuted approach tend toward two results, and your preference may be exemplified by how you react to the title: Would you rather that she rues how the universe is indeed tragic, or that she sends up self-important tragedians?

Thomas actually does both, and more, in this authentically weird and intriguing book. Meg is a thirtysomething genre writer (and frustrated literary novelist) agonized by her unappreciative bohemian partner, tempted by an affair with an older man, plagued by money and career woes, and pleased to have similarly suffering female friends. Thomas takes these staples of contemporary women’s fiction and transplants them into a world halfway to Synecdoche, N.Y., if not The Matrix. (One of Our Tragic Universe‘s epigraphs is taken from Neo’s favorite philosopher, Baudrillard.) Another apt comparison is Inception — as in that movie, Thomas’ characters spend much of the book having expository conversations, and those long chats are as likely to focus on exchanges of zen koans and folk tales or the rules of ghostwritten fiction as they are with the nature of paradoxes or theories about the end of the universe … all done with the flavor of explaining the rules for some magic realism that’s waiting in the wings.

But Thomas slow plays all of that — perhaps too slowly, depending on your mileage with modern novels of passive-aggressive manners — and lets the mysteries of Meg’s life resolve, if nothing else, her struggles to find a way to write fiction that’s true to her in defiance of the rules of Aristotle, Chekov, Tolstoy and countless other men. (You’ll giggle along with Meg at another character’s distaste for these instructors’ insistence that obstacles be “overcome.”) If, for 2010′s metafictional sweepstakes, you’re looking for a thought-provoking yin to go along with the yang of Adam Ross's Mr. Peanut, Our Tragic Universe is your book.