Excerpt from THE ORGAN-GRINDER'S MONKEY: CULTURE AFTER THE AVANT-GARDE, published by Litteraria Pragensia. “From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel.” So begins an article by Zadie Smith for the New York Review of Books, November 2008,[1] the two novels in question being Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland – a “breed of lyrical Realism”[2] concerned with the poignancy of experiences born of 9/11 – and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder – whose rejection of the intellectual and emotive premises of Netherland is described by Smith as “a function of our ailing literary culture.” Smith posits these diametrically opposed forms of Realism as demarcating the sole viable divergent routes of the contemporary Anglophone novel. “In healthy times,” she notes,