This interview with Michel Faber adds to my growing sense that the inherent shortcomings of realism are going to be a major literary preoccupation over the next few years.

I have complicated feelings about this in that I in many ways increasingly share Faber’s frustration with straight unadulterated realism, both as a writer and as a reader.

More and more, it seems to me that a certain determinedly realist mode feels like more of a contrivance than a surrealist, speculative, or anti-realist one. It feels as if too much is excluded, as if some vital part of our inner, imaginary experience is denied.

But at the same time I feel uncomfortable sometimes with the way these discussions play out. Because novelists are always to some extent setting out the stall for their own work, there’s a tendency for us to sound flippant when saying what we don’t want to do.

What worries me about this is: outside of the realm of fiction,lots of marriages probably are falling apart because of COVID, work etc. That seems to me to be a pretty common experience.

I sometimes get the sense that when we dismiss realism, we accidentally scorn the reality of lives which realism would take as its subject. It’s as if we’re saying: this life is not a good subject for a novel because it’s inherently boring.

And I don’t agree with that position either. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a life that doesn’t merit attention or novelistic treatment.

I think we have to be very careful as novelists not to imply, deliberately or otherwise, that certain aspects of everyday life have been, literarily speaking “done” and so can’t be done again. Because it’s just not true.

I see this all the time not only in interviews with writers, but all over social media. “I don’t want to read about X”. “I’m so bored of novels about Y.” There’s always this faint suggestion that it’s not only the novel that’s dull, it’s the life it renders too.

The other problem with this hard border between realism and whatever opposes realism is that it doesn’t hold, and it still doesn’t address the problem that sometimes makes straight realism feel staid in the first place:

Our lives contain both the quotidian and the visionary at the same time at all times. Your marriage and job don’t vanish because you dream of or imagine other worlds, and your capacity for leaving quotidian experience isn’t diminished by the demands of real life.

Various mystical traditions seem to me to address this very point: that the non-real is accessed directly through the quotidian, that daily life is not a barrier but a gateway into something else, that other worlds don’t obscure but in fact overlap with this most immediate one.

The most obvious example being: dreams, which strangely are often *also* dismissed as being not novel-worthy, or extraneous to the work of rendering lived experience in a compelling way.

So I embrace this era of realism going under the microscope, of realist assumptions being challenged, and all the personal and political implications that come with that. But I reject what I see as the terms of the debate, which are too binary and therefore too boring.

In my view, the future, in personal, political, and artistic terms, has to be about the loosening of boundaries that no longer hold, the bleeding of every category into its near relative or opposite. There can be no easy dismissals and there can be no easy answers.

And everyday life, the experiences of people who maybe don’t write novels, or whose imaginative lives may even have been curtailed by circumstance, can and must still be at the heart of that project, however weird it gets.