Fiction and metafiction: Europe and the U.S.

Hadn't heard of the Swiss writer Peter Stamm until this week's New Yorker, which includes a very elegant story by him, Sweet Dreams: seemingly very simple narrative account of a young couple just getting used to sharing an apartment, living together, making all the decisions and accommodations that young coupes do make - which couch to buy, what to have for dinner - we learn that the young woman is a bit sexually timid, even cold, and over the course of the story, she has a breakthrough and becomes much more sexually aggressive and fulfilled - but sadly her awakening is in part out of a desire to keep him, a fear of losing him - he's slightly flirtatious with a waitress (who's also a neighbor) and we sense that something will happen there - or if not with her, with somebody else - and he's much more reluctant to say that he loves his partner and to talk about their future - all done very subtly and beautifully. The most striking thing about the story is, however, the way in which Stamm plays with the narrative voice and the point of view: (spoilers here if you haven't read the story): a character, man in dark coat, appears in the story, the woman sees him on the bus with them when they're on their homeward commute, and he looks at her and he's somewhat menacing. We expect him to reappear, and he does in a surprising way: He is it turns out a Swiss author, and the woman sees him later on a TV talk show describing how he wrote his most recent story, he'd seen an earnest young couple on a bus and wondered what they were talking about, what their life was like. So it's one of these self-reflective stories, a fiction about a fiction, that keeps us thinking: what does it mean to read (or to write) a story? In what sense is a character in a story "real" - and can any one character be more real than another? Is the author (in the story) real and the couple not? Are they all fictive? Fiction is an imitation of an action - but it's also a construction of words. Very provocative story, and I might like to read more by Stamm - but I do feel that this "logocentric" fiction is kind of passe in America, out with the 1970s and all the crowing back then about the Death of the Novel - but this playing with form still seems to be an endless fascination for European writers. Why is that? Is their society, fraught with upheaval, in some ways like the U.S. in the 1970s? Is metafiction a provence of the the intellectual elite - who still hold sway in European letters, though not in American literary fiction (except the fiction most steeped in university writing programs and English Departments)?