When do stories seem real?

I was rereading Lord of the Rings the other day and was struck by how real it felt. I mean, sure, it’s fiction, there’s no such thing as trolls etc., but it just had this feeling of “thick description,” the sense that it was describing something important events in a real place.

In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill, which I absolutely loved . . . it doesn’t feel “real,” whatever that means. Golden Hill seems more like a beautiful confection, a delightful clockwork mechanism, a Spielbergian tour de force. I enjoyed reading it more than I enjoyed reading Lord of the Rings, but it didn’t seem like it was really happening in the same way. It didn’t have the sonority.

I say that even though Golden Hill is evidently well-researched, and New York in the 1750s really is real in a way that Middle-Earth could never be that way. Also, each of the characters in Golden Hill felt like real people, whereas none of the characters in Lord of the Rings felt real at all. OK, Gandalf maybe, but that’s it.

Remember that phrase from Marianne Moore, “imaginary gardens with real toads”? Lord of the Rings is kind of the opposite: a real garden with imaginary toads.

So my question is, What makes a story seem real? Why does Lord of the Rings, for all its flaws, feel real, while Golden Hill does not? I could go through some examples: – From Here to Eternity: Seems real. Dude opened up a vein with that one. anything by Norman Mailer: Does not seem real. – The Young Lions: Seems real, despite its staginess. – Philip K. Dick: Seems real (paradoxically so), and the characters’ actions and emotions seem real, but very few of the main characters seem real. His protagonists never seem real, but some of the supporting characters can attain the sense of reality. – Rabbit, Run: Seems real (sorry!). – anything by Philip Roth: Does not seem real. Even though so much of it is autobiographical. – John O’Hara: I hate to say it, but his books seem real too. – George V. Higgins: Seems real. – Elmore Leonard: Does not seem real.

I’m not saying that “seems real” is necessarily desirable. Great Expectations is a confection, I’d argue the greatest ever written—it does not seem real in the way that David Copperfield seems real, but who cares, it’s not supposed to. I doubt that anything George Bernard Shaw ever wrote feels real, and that’s fine. The thing with Lord of the Rings is just kinda funny because that book is a conscious throwback to those old non-realistic Norse sagas, and I think that, paradoxically, it gets some of its sense of realism from its artlessness. Not that artlessness is required for realism; see Updike above. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Richard Ford, or many others.