Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire was groundbreaking because it inserted a story where few would have looked to find one: scholarly footnotes. The novel consists of a foreword, a poem, notes to the poem, and an index--it is supposedly an academic work authored by a Charles Kinbote. Where is the story? Well, readers familiar with the book know that the story is mainly found in Kinbote's notes. Hinted at in the foreword and poem, the story emerges as Kinbote's annotations grow more and more personal, more and more narrative.

Stories are generally thought of as the meat of a book, the stuff that everything else hangs on to, but in Pale Fire Nabokov reversed that equation. The story was the errata that hung on to what was supposedly the meat. By reversing things, Nabokov drew attention not to the plot, but to the way it was conveyed to the reader. He cast the reader's eye toward the nuts and bolts and screws and gears that most authors are at pains to hide.

In doing so, Nabokov took the questions that normally lie beneath the surface of a narrative and made them too obvious to miss. All literature is concerned with more than just the narrative: wrapped up in each novel are ideas about life, love, the world, whatever, and a novelist probes at them elliptically while telling the story. With some books, you have to look very closely before you "get" what they're talking about, but with Pale Fire, that part was obvious. It was metafiction about how stories are told. That's not to say that Pale Fire didn't have extraordinarily well crafted characters, or a tight story that holds up to multiple readings--it had those things--but it was also quite clear that before all that it was a book that questioned what a narrative could be.

I happen to like books like Pale Fire, books that explore the different ways that a narrative can be told. Often I find that because of their unconventional format, they get at parts of our minds and our society that straighter stories are unable to pry at.

Over the past year I've read a number of quite good books like Pale Fire. They return to Nabokov's timeless question of what a narrative can be, but they also pose more situated questions about the contemporary world around us.