Bestselling Novels: Realism

The bestsellers of realist fiction, highly disputed as they are, can always hope for some favorable or unreservedly positive classification as ‘art’—and often end up receiving it. This has worked to the benefit of popular works by authors from Ernest Hemingway to Heinrich Böll and Jonathan Franzen. For this reason, bestselling realist novels—and the praise they receive—rank among the foremost challenges and obstacles to certain key principles of modern art. Firstly, the praise for such bestsellers goes against the bohemian conception, that considers success among a large audience to be a reliable indicator of artistic failure. Secondly, such praise contradicts the demand, one central to avant-garde experimental movements, that works should serve—by dint of strong artistic ‘estrangement’—to achieve a break from the everyday and from undemanding perception.