Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism. by Ian McGuire (review)

Since Virginia Woolf's famous assertion that "in or about December, 1910, human character changed," it has been the prevailing critical opinion that the conventions of literary realism have ceased to be effective in detailing the social and intellectual tendencies of our most recent historical period.¹ Even those who do not fully subscribe to Woolf's periodization admit that realism, at the very least, began a steady and irrepressible decline at the start of the twentieth century. The persistence of realism, even into the twenty-first century, so the story goes, is an example of an unfortunate conservatism, a premodernist hangover, a symptom of false consciousness on behalf of an author caught in the net of ideological orthodoxy. It is intriguing then, that Ian McGuire's recent monograph, Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism, the sixth addition to Samuel Cohen's excellent New American Canon series, opens with the following declaration, "This book is, among other things, a defense of contemporary realist writing" (xi). While not necessarily supporting a premodernist revival, McGuire's monograph still works against the academic grain—its "low-level antirealist assumptions" and its "dominant model of literacy periodization"—and argues that realism remains a useful, indeed a necessary, critical category and that rather than being merely conventional or reactionary, contemporary realism offers an "aesthetically and philosophically sophisticated way of engaging with and contesting the particularities of contemporary, even postmodern, experience" (xi).

McGuire's introduction provides a valuable summary of the debates surrounding literary realism to date. Building upon recent publications by Samuel Cohen, Robert Rebein, and Joseph Dewey, he convincingly resists the conceptualization of the contemporary realist novel as being what Fredric Jameson superciliously calls "realism after realism" and contends with Mark McGurl's influential formulation of postwar American literature in which "realism has no part to play" (xvi). In doing so, McGuire actively pushes against the antirealist prejudices of contemporary criticism, not in order to reignite the realism-versus-postmodernism debate of the 1970s and '80s, but rather to point out that important realist work continues to be written and that academics currently lack the critical tools or inclination to properly engage with it. McGuire's larger arguments on realism are pursued via a series of readings of the fiction of Richard Ford, an eminent figure of contemporary literature, who has received little critical attention to date. He argues that Ford practices pragmatic realism—a form rooted in Emersonian thinking and analogous to Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam's American pragmatism—in which the "traditional realist claims to represent or grasp reality are maintained" but are tempered by a "pragmatic, antifoundationalist awareness that any reality that the realist grasps is only ever temporary" (xvii).

McGuire's ideas on contemporary realism are a valuable addition to the increasing critical literature on the topic, as is his analysis of Ford's fiction, which develops the debates set out in his introduction in the context of Ford's oeuvre. Many readers will no doubt be particularly interested in his analysis of Frank Bascombe—the novelist-turned-sportswriter-turned-realtor—who, while not an exact Everyman, still seems to embody contemporary American identity. In this, McGuire does not disappoint. Three of the five chapters present a reading of the Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land), while the other two deal with Ford's story collections Women With Men and A Multitude of Sins. Ford's collection Rock Springs is analyzed in a comparative discussion with The Sportswriter in the first chapter, and Canada, Ford's most recent novel, is assessed in the conclusion.²

The monograph's most compelling arguments are those surrounding the Bascombe trilogy. The first chapter examines an interesting dichotomy in Ford's early career: the near simultaneous publication of Rock Springs and The Sportswriter. Written at the same time, the former is a collection of stories in the vein of Hemingway's "flawed" and "limited" minimalism, while the latter is a prime example...