My second chapter begins with a comparison of Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, two writers who embody the competing aesthetic visions of contemporary “realists” and “experimentalists.” Focusing on their work and their high-profile debate about literary difficulty, I argue that their mutual commitment to their “community of readers” (as Franzen puts it) and to narratives of “the family gone wrong” (as Marcus puts it) actually points to a shared social vision, a vision in which “family” values are more important than aesthetic and political antagonisms. This focus on the family also cuts across the oppositions central to contemporary American politics, I show, and it informs the fiction and criticism of writers like Jeffrey Eugenides, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders. This domestic turn is figured, in several of these texts, as a revision of both American individualism and postmodern impersonality. I make the case that this triangulating impulse generates a range of formal innovations, from Eugenides’s re-invention of “the marriage plot” to Marcus’s self-reflexive blending of experimental impersonality and post-postmodern “emotionality.”

Ian McEwan’s post-realism is part of a marked aesthetic shift that began in the last decades of the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first. His novels, with their attention to close description and dependence on context as well as a qualified sense that language can capture inner and outer worlds, are part of a turn to the kinds of realism characteristic of the long nineteenth century. The essay argues the turn is transformative rather than nostalgic because, like so many of his contemporaries, McEwan responds to contemporary socio-political crises by means of postmodern strategies that include parody, irony, hybridity and metafiction. Three mid-career novels that loosely share the geopolitical context of World War II and the Cold War illustrate the argument: The Innocent, Black Dogs and Atonement. Postmodern technique and novelistic realism together provide a vehicle for McEwan’s long-standing exploration of human violence across both public and private spheres.