Campaign for the American Reader: Seven novels with storyteller main characters

Megan Cummins is the author of the novel Atomic Hearts and the story collection If the Body Allows It, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Bingham Award. The managing editor of Public Books and an editor at large at A Public Space, she lives in New York City.

At Electric Lit Cummins tagged seven novels showing that writer-protagonists can be a tool of versatility in a novel. One title on the list:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

One night in 1935, when Briony is an imaginative 13-year-old, she accuses the son of her family’s servant, Robbie, of committing a crime he’s innocent of. In general, Briony has a natural inclination toward storytelling; and in particular her mind on that night is influenced by a moment she witnessed between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie earlier that day. In 1940, Cecilia is a nurse and estranged from her family. Robbie’s enlistment is a condition of his release from prison. And Briony, a nurse-in-training, is still a writer. (In a rejection letter from a periodical, with an appearance by Elizabeth Bowen, we read a critique of a scene recognizable as one we’ve read earlier in the book.) While writing is central to Briony throughout the novel, it’s Atonement’s extraordinary metafictional twist of an ending (which I dare not give away to readers out there who don’t know) that to me emphasizes the lengths we’ll go, the detours we’ll take, in life as in writing, to try to find the right ending. It’s a book whose metafictional elements make it so famous it feels almost unnecessary to include it on a reading list 25 years after its publication, but it was probably the first book I read, back in college, that made me realize just how important metafiction can be to a novel.