Realism Is Unrealistic

Salman Rushdie has a quarrel with the most respectable word in fiction: real. Realism, he argues, rests on a handshake between writer and reader, an agreement about what the world is like, and in Candide Voltaire tears that agreement up long before the modernists get credit for it. Rushdie calls his witnesses: the doomed heroines of grand opera, a general Tolstoy invented outright, the war novels that only worked by going strange, and a reporting trip to Nicaragua that felt like walking into a book he already knew. Then he opens the workshop and shows what pulls a reader through a novel. The professors will not love the answer.