Zadie Smith: Essays versus fiction

In The Guardian, Zadie Smith considers the arguments presented by David Shields whose new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call 'truthiness' – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives.

Smith is not convinced:

In these arguments the new received wisdom is that all plots are 'conventional' and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted. Such objections are, I think, sincere responses to the experience of reading bad novels