REALISM IS ALWAYS A complicated concept for fiction. From the time of Flaubert and Henry James realism has furnished fiction writers with a set of tools for re-presenting the world—tools that authors tended to either use (William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, John Cheever) or to define themselves by not using (James Joyce, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace). Even today, and despite the best efforts of more than a century of technical experiments, correspondence to reality (and its corollary, relatability of character) tends to be the most important aesthetic criterion for most lay readers, at least in America. The problems with the category of “realism” are manifold; the most convincing critique to my eyes is Ian Watt's in The Rise of the Novel. Watt argues that “formal realism” is essentially a literary convention among other literary conventions. Formal realism demands that the novel be “a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms.” But Watt says that readers and theorists alike run into trouble when they assume that “the report on human life which is presented by” realism is “any truer than those presented through the very different conventions of other literary genres.” If fidelity to what is “real” is the criterion of literary realism, after all, then every work of literature is realistic; no author sets out to portray something that she or he feels is false, and even speculative and fantastic works of fiction are “realistic” in the sense that they point to some idea that their authors feel is intrinsic to human life. Even Plato's allegory of the cave is realistic in this broadest sense, since it is meant to alert us to the unreality of the physical world that formal realism takes for granted.

But if formal realism is concerned with vivid characters and particular details, as Watt suggests, then there can be little doubt that John Updike is, by and large, a formal realist.