Here are two recent statements about literary realism, statements so typical of their age that a realist novelist would have been proud to have imagined them into life. The first is by Rick Moody, reviewing JM Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello in Bookforum: “It’s quaint to say so, but the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement, its conventional humanisms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it’s politically and philosophically dubious and often dull.” The second is by Patrick Giles, contributing to a long, raucous discussion about fiction, realism, and fictional credibility on a literary blog called The Elegant Variation: “And the notion that this [the realistic novel] is the supreme genre of the lit tradition is so laughable that I ain’t even gonna indulge myself.”

A style unites the two statements, a down-home relaxation of diction (”kick in the ass,” “ain’t even gonna”), which itself informs us about the writers’ attitudes towards realism’s own style: it is thought to be stuffy, correct, unprogressive, and the only way even to discuss it—”so laughable”—is to mock it with its stylistic opposite, the vernacular. Realism, it seems, is so conventional it is almost embarrassing (”quaint”) to be caught discussing it at all. A curious anxiety, when one considers that the era Giles dismisses stretches from, at least, Balzac to Forster, from 1830 to 1910. It is a little like dismissing as beneath comedy the idea that English poetry reached any kind of pinnacle from Shakespeare to Milton, or that music did the same from Beethoven to Mahler.

The major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism. Anywhere fiction is discussed with partisan heat, a faultline emerges, with “realists” and traditionalists on one side and postmodernists and experimentalists on the other. No comparable struggle exists in British fiction because experimental fiction has never been substantial enough to mount a decent campaign against the dominant discourse. But the 1960s avant-garde in America was full of talent and vigour. In addition to writers like John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino, who never really reached popular audiences, many of the avant-gardists of that period became mainstream, notably Thomas Pynchon and the delightful story-writer Donald Barthelme and William Gass, and the unclassifiable Kurt Vonnegut. The heirs of this era of experiment might include Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Ben Marcus, all very different from each other and of different ages, but all committed in one way or another to going beyond realism. A testament to the success of avant-gardism in America was offered, in 1986, by Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, which took just what it needed from postmodern narrative games in order to make a fundamentally metaphysical argument about the different ways of living, and narrating, a life. In a younger generation, Jonathan Franzen’s writings about whether he is a highbrow artist or a popular entertainer, and his tortured negotiations with the legacies of DeLillo and William Gaddis, are difficult to imagine without the challenge of American experimentalism in the 1960s and 1970s.

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