"I think there is a divide, but I think the dividing line isn’t around realism versus anti-realism. For me, that just doesn’t work. I loved that long article Zadie Smith wrote and thought it was very intelligent in many different ways, but I just don’t buy this idea of realism being the dividing line because it just doesn’t work…Life is fragmented and cut up and so is consciousness and so is the world. Realism is just a literary convention like any other. For me where it does break down is the question of liberal humanism or sentimental humanism on the one hand, and on the other a writing that’s informed and inspired by modernism and you know a rainbow coalition of psycho analysis, continental philosophy, the avant-garde, all these exhilirating things that happened in the last 100 years. Lots of things contemporary fiction seems determined to ignore."
